Creating a new To Do in your calendar store without needing iCal

[elspub]

Just figured out how to create a new To Do, which shows up in both Mail and iCal, using AppleScriptObjC rather than via iCal’s applescripting. This is nice because iCal doesn’t need to be open to do it.

Thought I’d post the code in case anyone else is interested:

Copy the properties to the beginning of your script.

using the handler is as simple as this

set nwTd to my newTodo(“Remember the Milk”,3,“Thursday”)

Where “Remember The Milk” is the to do
3 (as integer) is the priority of the to do, on a scale of 1 - 4, where 1 is no priority and 4 is highest priority.
“Thursday” is the date, which is parsed thru NSDate’s natural language class, meaning the following all work:
“Thursday”, “Tomorrow”, “11/12”, “12/09/09”, and more.

Lastly, in the newTodo handler, you need to change useCal to the name of the calendar you want the To Do listed in, as a string

property parent : class “NSObject”
property CalCalendarStore : class “CalCalendarStore”
property CalTaskClass : class “CalTask”
property dateClass : class “NSDate”

set nwTd to my newTodo(“Remember the Milk”,3,“Thursday”)

on newTodo(icalSum, icalPri, icalDue)
set useCal to “NameOfTheCalendarYouWantToUse”
if icalPri is 1 then
set icalPri to 0
else if icalPri is 2 then
set icalPri to 9
else if icalPri is 3 then
set icalPri to 5
else if icalPri is 4 then
set icalPri to 1
end if
if icalDue is not “” then
try
set nowDt to dateClass’s dateWithNaturalLanguageString_(icalDue)
on error
set nowDt to missing value
end try
else
set nowDt to missing value
end if
try
set calendarStore to CalCalendarStore’s defaultCalendarStore
set theCalendars to calendarStore’s calendars
set aCalTask to CalTaskClass’s task()
set calct to count of items of theCalendars
repeat with i from 1 to calct
set thsCal to (get item i of theCalendars)
set thsCalTtl to |title| of thsCal as string
if thsCalTtl is useCal then
set aCalTask’s calendar to thsCal
end if
end repeat
set the |title| of aCalTask to icalSum
set the priority of aCalTask to icalPri
if nowDt is not missing value then
set the |dueDate| of aCalTask to nowDt
end if
set returnValue to calendarStore’s saveTask_error_(aCalTask, missing value)
end try
return “”
end newTodo

UPDATE-- forgot two things:
in XCode, right-click on Linked Frameworks and choose add existing framework, then scroll to find CalendarStore.framework and choose that.

2. In your appname_Prefix.pch add

[Gil]

elspub, This article was very helpful getting me started on my project. Thanks for posting it.

–Gil