Subevents in iCalendar

Question

I ask myself if there is a possible way to create subevents in the iCalendar file format. For example, if an event has duration of 12:00 to 14:00 I would like to divide it into 12:00 to 13:00 and 13:00 to 14:00 as subevents.

NOTE: Apple's iCal uses the kind of subevent I would like to use with "travel time". It adds a kinda subevent before the actual event.

Is there a way to do it?

Answer 1

if you look at the iCalendar list of components there is only events listed and no subevents, similarly an event can only have a certain number of properties and none are subevent. One provision in iCaleandar specification is for relations between components which you could use to define one VEVENT as a CHILD of another but is not what you are asking for.

If you open the actual event created with travel time by icalendar, you will see that only one VEVENT is created and that Apple created a new non-standard property: X-APPLE-TRAVEL-DURATION and that the event DTSTART is actually set to your event start DATE-TIME minus your travel time.

So bottom line to answer your question, it is not possible to create sub-events but multiple ways exist to achieve a similar result as the iCalendar feature you mentionned: create multiple VEVENT (one for travel and one for the actual event), create one event of the total duration (event+travel) with only standard properties, create one VEVENT with the Apple non-standard property (X-APPLE-TRAVEL-DURATION)