iOS 6 Programming Cookbook

16.3. Accessing the Contents of Calendars

Problem

You want to retrieve events of type EKEvent from a calendar of type EKCalendar on an iOS device.

Solution

Follow these steps:

1. Instantiate an object of type EKEventStore.

2. Using the calendars property of the event store (instantiated in step 1), find the calendar you want to read from.

3. Determine the time and date where you want to start the search in the calendar and the time and date where the search must stop.

4. Pass the calendar object (found in step 2), along with the two dates you found in step 3, to the predicateForEventsWithStartDate:endDate:calendars: instance method of EKEventStore.

5. Pass the predicate created in step 4 to the eventsMatchingPredicate: instance method of EKEventStore. The result of this method is an array of EKEvent objects (if any) that fell between the given dates (step 3) in the specified calendar (step 2).

This code illustrates the above steps:

- (EKCalendar *) calDAVCalendarWithTitleContaining
                 :(NSString *)paramDescription{
  
  EKCalendar *result = nil;
  
  EKEventStore *eventStore = [[EKEventStore alloc] init];
  
  for (EKCalendar *thisCalendar in eventStore.calendars){
    if (thisCalendar.type == EKCalendarTypeCalDAV){
      if ([thisCalendar.title 
           rangeOfString:paramDescription].location != NSNotFound){
        return thisCalendar;
      }
    }
  }
  
  return result;
  
}

- (void) readEvents{
  
  /* Find a calendar to base our search on */
  EKCalendar *targetCalendar = 
    [self calDAVCalendarWithTitleContaining:@"gmail.com"];
  
  /* If we could not find a CalDAV calendar ...