Google Calendar Suggester (GCS)

Contents

Installation
Run
Use cases
ToDo

This script will give suggestions for free meeting slots for a group of people needed for a meeting and who are working at Linaro. This feature exists to some extent in the web version of Google calendar and is called "suggested times". However, there are limitations with suggested times. You can only get the information as an image and not as text. Also, you can only get a week at a time and in addition to that you have to setup a "fake" meeting that you later on need to throw away.

The use case for this script is when you have a need to arrange a meeting consisting of a group of people from Linaro and people outside Linaro. It's cumbersome and error prone to manually read from the calendar and write in an email to the externals. With this script, you get suggestions on half an hour basis for all the people that you intend to invite from Linaro. Everything in text-format ready to be copy/pasted into the email with the external people you're trying to agree on a day and time with for a meeting.

Installation

It's rather tricky to run Google API, but in short you will need to enable the Google Calendar API and create an app at https://console.cloud.google.com and setup OAuth2 credentials.

Create an app

At https://console.cloud.google.com create a new project, give it meaningful name (Project name), put it under linaro.org (Organization) and for Location, browse and put the app under Engineering.

Enable the Google Calendar API

At https://console.cloud.google.com, go to "APIs & Services > Library", and search for Google Calendar API, press it and press then Enable button.

Setup OATH2

Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials and press + CREATE CREDENTIALS, select OAuth client ID. For Application type, select Desktop app and give it a (any) name. Once completed you should find your new Oauth2 credential under OAuth 2.0 Client IDs. On the right side, press the arrow to download this credential. Save the file for now, we will use it later on.

Clone the script

$ git clone https://github.com/jbech-linaro/gcs.git

Install necessary Python packages

$ cd gcs
$ pip install --user -r requirements.txt

Install the credentials

In the "Setup OATH2" step you downloaded a file, you need to move and rename the file to the root of the "gcs" folder. The final name should be credentials.json.

$ mv <download-dir>/client_secret_9321...ontent.com.json credentials.json

Run

First time you run it the browser will open up and ask for permissions to run the script. This will create a file called token.pickle. After that the script will work as expected.

Use cases

Here are a couple of examples. There are default settings that will pick all free slots for "joakim.bech" at the current day when the script is run and with timezone UTC+1 (for now edit default setting in the script to your needs).

Get help

Simply call the script with -h.

$ ./gcs.py -h

Limit the time of day

Let's say that you are in Europe and want to invite people from US to the meeting. Then you simply don't want to show all morning meetings, since that would be in the middle of the night for the US people. By specifying -ne ("no earlier than") and/or -nl ("no later than"). I.e., you can narrow down things to a few hours.

$ ./gcs.py -ne 14 -nl 19
2020-11-10 14:00 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
2020-11-10 14:30 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
2020-11-10 15:00 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
...

Set start and end date

By default the script uses the current day, but if you want to find a free slots for more than the current day then you do that with -s and -e. In the example below we're combining it with the parameters from the previous example.

$ ./gcs.py -ne 14 -nl 19 -s 2020-11-15 -e 2020-11-20
2020-11-10 14:00 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
2020-11-10 14:30 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
2020-11-10 15:00 UTC+1 (Tuesday)
...

If you omit the start ("-s"), then it'll use the current day. Meaning that if you want to find a slot starting from "today" and X days in the future, then you simply use the -e only. Example:

$ ./gcs.py -ne 14 -nl 19 -e 2020-11-20
...

Add people to the planned meeting

This is main use case and idea for writing this script. I.e., try to find a free slots for a group of people and get into text format. You do that by adding a comma-separated list of first.last-names (no spaces after the comma!).

$ ./gcs.py -ne 16 -nl 19 -s 2020-11-11 -e 2020-11-13 -p joakim.bech,david.brown,ryan.arnold
2020-11-11 18:00 UTC+1 (Wednesday)
2020-11-12 18:00 UTC+1 (Thursday)
2020-11-13 16:00 UTC+1 (Friday)
...

List additional timezones

If you want to show the suggested slots in other timezones than your own default timezone, then you can do that by adding UTC's after the "-eu" (extra UTCs). Note that there is a limitation with the Python Argparser treating negative numbers as parameters. The workaround will be shown as an example further down.

Here is an example to get the times UTC+2 and UTC-3 in addition to the default timezone.

$ ./gcs.py -eu 2,-3
2020-11-11 08:00 UTC+1, 09:00 UTC+2, 04:00 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 08:30 UTC+1, 09:30 UTC+2, 04:30 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 09:00 UTC+1, 10:00 UTC+2, 05:00 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
...

Here is are a couple of examples on how to use negative numbers.

# A single negative number [OK]
$ ./gcs.py -eu -3
2020-11-11 08:00 UTC+1, 04:00 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 08:30 UTC+1, 04:30 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 09:00 UTC+1, 05:00 UTC-3 (Wednesday)
...

# Two negative number [NOK, argparser bug]
$ ./gcs.py -eu -3,-4
...
gcs.py: error: argument -eu/--extra-utc: expected one argument

# Workaround for argparser bug when using two negative numbers
$ ./gcs.py -eu 0,-3,-4
2020-11-11 08:00 UTC+1, 07:00 UTC+0, 04:00 UTC-3, 03:00 UTC-4 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 08:30 UTC+1, 07:30 UTC+0, 04:30 UTC-3, 03:30 UTC-4 (Wednesday)
2020-11-11 09:00 UTC+1, 08:00 UTC+0, 05:00 UTC-3, 04:00 UTC-4 (Wednesday)
...

Show weekends

This is an unlikely use case, but if for some reason one wants to suggest calls during the weekend, then that can be done with the "-w" parameter. Here is an example combined with some other parameters.

$ ./gcs.py  -e 2020-11-16 -s 2020-11-13 -e 2020-11-16 -nl 19 -ne 17 -w
2020-11-13 17:00 UTC+1 (Friday)
2020-11-13 17:30 UTC+1 (Friday)
2020-11-13 18:00 UTC+1 (Friday)
2020-11-14 17:00 UTC+1 (Saturday)
2020-11-14 17:30 UTC+1 (Saturday)
2020-11-14 18:00 UTC+1 (Saturday)
2020-11-15 17:00 UTC+1 (Sunday)
...

ToDo

Fix so you can add timezone as a parameter or config file.
Give option to get suggestions on hour basis instead of just half hour basis.
Remove hard-code "joakim.bech" as the default person.
General cleanup, since this was a quick and dirty hack, that nevertheless seems to work fine.