Downloading .ics file

[Tristan Jin]

How would you download a .ics file? Is there a built-in method I can use, or should I use the buildEvent method to return a string, then convert to .ics myself?

[Michael Gifford-Santos]

If you're using something like Express with a REST endpoint, your final response will be something like this:

res
.set(
'Content-Disposition',
'attachment; filename="${FILE_NAME}.ics"',
)
.set('Content-Type', 'text/calendar')
.status(200)
.send(ics);
}

They key is to set your HTTP headers so clients know how to handle the response (in this case, an ics text file).

The ics is either generated in a function prior to the final response code above, or perhaps loaded from a cached source (in the case of a feed you probably don't want to regenerate it on every request, so you have other mechanisms to update the feed snapshot).

[Christopher Webb]

For the use case where you're generating client side, you can use the popular library downloadjs or create a simple utility function.

  function downloadFile(config: { fileContents: any; fileName: string; mimeType: string }) {
    const { mimeType, fileContents, fileName } = config
    const blob = new Blob([fileContents], { type: mimeType })
    const url = URL.createObjectURL(blob)
    const link = document.createElement('a')
    link.setAttribute('href', url)
    link.setAttribute('download', fileName)
    document.body.appendChild(link)
    link.click()
    document.body.removeChild(link)
  }
  
  // ...
downloadFile({
    mimeType: 'text/calendar',
    fileContents: value,
    fileName: 'meeting.ics',
})