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2023

Update

Improvements

  • Connections with Google Calendar sinks that contain many events now run much faster and therefore more frequently.
    • Previously, connections with sink calendars that have hundreds or thousands of non-ChronoLink events could run for several minutes even when there was nothing to do. Some connections even took 15 or 20 minutes!
    • Now, thanks to our new approach, most such runs complete in less than 20 seconds. Also, the total number of runs per hour increased by 60%.
  • Users can now opt in to synchronizing PENDING or DECLINED meeting invitations by using the new include transformer.
    • Previously, ChronoLink always skipped such invitations.
  • Added the exclude transformer to allow excluding an event from the synchronization run.
    • Using the exclude transformer on an event is effectively equivalent to filtering out that event with a suitable condition.

Changes

  • The organizer condition now also allows checking only the domain of the meeting organizer.
    • Previously, this functionality was offered by the organizerdomain condition, which has now been removed. Existing connections using organizerdomain have been migrated automatically.

Fixes

  • When reading from Google Calendar, ChronoLink now synchronizes meetings that the calendar owner organizes but does not attend.

Documentation

Update

Improvements

  • ChronoLink now supports accessing calendars via the iCalendar (ICS) standard.
    • This feature can be used to connect many different systems which ChronoLink does not support natively. Therefore, it depends on the respective system which kind of event data is included.
    • In addition, connecting via an iCalendar address can help in case your organization's administrators have restricted access by apps like ChronoLink.
    • Usage: create a new connection, open the "Source" selection list, scroll down to locate the "Other" section and choose the option "iCalendar". Then, enter the URL given by the other system in the "Source Calendar Address" field.

Update

Improvements

  • The ChronoLink configuration page now lists all linked accounts in one table, regardless of whether they are set up for login, calendar access, or both.
    • Previously, linked accounts were listed in two tables called "Login" and "Access". As user feedback showed us that this strict separation made initial setup more difficult, we removed it.
  • If any connection references a linked account, ChronoLink no longer allows deleting the calendar access from that account.
    • This change prevents users from accidentally deleting their connections together with the calendar access.

Update

Improvements

  • ChronoLink now synchronizes event visibility for Google and Microsoft calendars:
    • If the Source and Sink are in the same system, the created event will have the same visibility as the source.
    • In case of different systems, PRIVATE visibility will be kept. Other visibility values will be translated to their closest equivalent. For details, see the corresponding table in our docs.
  • Added the visibility condition and the visibilitychange transformer.

Update

Improvements

  • To increase performance and punctuality of scheduled runs, multiple connections from the same ChronoLink account are now allowed to run at the same time.
    • Previously, we prevented this to make sure that users with many connections did not slow down other users.
    • Having recently rewritten our connection queue, we can now achieve the same goal in a better way: we always favor any due connection from users who have no currently running connection. Then, any leftover capacity is used to run additional connections for other users.
  • We made minor changes to the configuration page in order to make it less confusing:
    • The connection label field is now called "Name" and has a placeholder text to make its purpose more obvious. Also, it was moved to the top of the form, where one would expect a name field to be.
    • We added borders to the login, access and connection tables. This ensures they are still recognizable as tables even when they are empty. We now also display "You don't have access to any calendars yet" and "You don't have any connections yet" messages in that situation.

Update

Improvements

  • Added the limit condition to restrict the number of synchronized events. For example, this allows synchronizing only the first event for each day or week.

Update

Changes

  • We changed several Transformers and Conditions in order to improve their usability and increase consistency:
    • The overwrite, append, prepend and clear transformers were replaced by a single textchange transformer where you specify the desired operation by setting mode to OVERWRITE, APPEND, PREPEND or CLEAR.
    • The text condition was changed so that the field to search is specified via field. Previously, it was specified via scope, but we figured that consistency with the textual transformers (old and new) and the filled condition would be better.
    • The statusset transformer was renamed to statuschange.
  • With these changes, ChronoLink now has a textchange transformer corresponding to the text condition and a statuschange transformer corresponding to the status condition. This clear structure should make it easier to remember the names.
  • The configuration of existing connections was updated automatically.

Improvements

  • We updated the Examples page and added more interesting code snippets. We also improved its structure to make the content easier to understand.

Housekeeping

  • When encountering temporary connection errors, ChronoLink waits a random amount of time before retrying. The maximum delay was now reduced from 4 to 2 hours.
    • The minimum delay remains at 1 hour.
    • As before, the retry mechanism is fully automatic.

Update

Improvements

  • Added three new conditions you can use to customize your synchronization connections:
    • duration to detect short or long events
    • isallday to distinguish all-day events from those with start and end times
    • filled to check whether an event has a description or a location

Housekeeping

  • Updated the Clockodo integration due to announced changes of their interface. ChronoLink functionality is not affected.

New Website

The ChronoLink website got a big makeover. Apart from a nicer, fresher look, this is what we improved:

  • The documentation is no longer buried in several PDFs, but tightly integrated into the regular website.
  • All examples for Conditions and Transformers now have a "copy to clipboard" button, making it really easy to use them when configuring your sync connections.
  • There is a built-in search function.
  • The web site can be switched to dark mode.
  • Each heading has its own direct link which you can copy and paste to chat apps, forum posts, emails and the like.
  • We created a proper imprint page.