Hello folks,
I was just wondering if anyone was including an iCal element in their booking confirmations? If you are doing this, would you mind sharing your process and any tops/tricks?
Hope you're all well and safe!
TIA
Martin
If you mean "booking confirmations" specifically to refer to the "booking" functionality in Tessitura, then no. But we now include an "Add to Calendar" button in all of our e-mail confirmations as well as on our TNEW receipt page and the event pages themselves (Corporate side). It required a custom API call to be set up that creates the .ics file based upon the performance number, but essentially then it is just a link that we can now place anywhere as long as we can grab the performance number. It is built into our corporate event pages directly, added to the receipt page via Javascript, and then I had to edit the CartHTML.xslt file to put the link in there (will be MUCH easier in HTML templates once that happens).
If you want to go through an example on our website and see all three in action, start here: https://thecenterpresents.org/tickets-events/events/2122/center-presents/live-at-the-center-sophie-faught-quartet/. Just make sure you choose the LIVESTREAM option, as that is free.
Let me know if you have any questions.
John
Hi, John!
Did you use a 3rd-party API such as AddEvent.com to create your .ics? Not aware of a Tessitura API that can do that.
Thanks!
Mike Drennan - Software Engineer
The Tech Interactive
San Jose, CA
Sorry, I did not actually write that part of the website myself, we had some developers do it, so I might have been unclear in my previous post (as I am not 100% certain that I understand all of the nitty gritty). The API call is written so that it takes the performance number as the parameter which then itself loads a page which (I think) uses a C# controller to essentially write and create the calendar file using the full write method of VCALENDAR with AppendLine and all that good stuff (at least, if I google "create ics file programmatically", those results look exactly like the code I see in our repository).
We had already had that created for another purpose using production season information, so the relevant part for this particular implementation was updating it so that it would work with only a performance number parameter.
Hope that helps!
It does. Thanks, John!
Hi John,
What you have is EXACTLY what we're looking for - as a ticket buyer, it's simple and elegant. FYI, I booked a comp for the event - I will keep the booking because, in my time zone, the event is at 10am and so will be a wonderful distraction as I wrangle Tessi! Sadly, we lack the in-house expertise to be creating API calls so I guess our process will have to be a little more tedious:
The tedious part will be creating and saving the iCal files - I reckon I can easily do item 3 by SQL.
If anyone has a better suggestion (many thanks for your feedback John!) I'm all ears!
Roll on TLCC!!