Get (Solspace) calendar occurences sorted by date

Question

I want to get all occurrences of a single calendar and sort them by the occurrence start date. The reason why I want to do this is because I want to create an occurrence details page. To do that I need the occurrence ID, the calendar:cal tag does not seem to give me the occurrence id when printing out a single occurrence. I have tried the calendar:occurrences tag, but I cannot get that one to sort the occurrences by occurence_start date. I have tried using the default orderby and sort options to accomplish the sorting, but to no avail.

How can I do this? What are my options?

Answer 1

First, I highly recommend having a look at this documentation page explaining the differences between some of the more common Calendar tags. Always useful:

http://www.solspace.com/docs/calendar/getting_started/

In detail, if you're looking to create a chronological list of events/occurrences, use {exp:calendar:cal}. This is the only tag that will make the necessary calculations to list your occurrences in chronological order. Each occurrence will be listed chronologically, with {event_start_date} displaying the start date of each occurrence:

{exp:calendar:cal 
   date_range_start="1 month ago" 
   date_range_end="+1 month"
   pad_short_weeks="n"}
   {events}
       [{event_id}] {event_title} - {event_start_date format="%Y-%m-%d"}<br />
   {/events}
{/exp:calendar:cal}

Occurrences do not have their own occurrence_id unless the occurrence is edited in the Control Panel. By default the ID is the same as the "master" event_id set up in the "Calendar: Events" channel entry form.

To print out information about a single occurrence (for a specific day, for example), a good solution is to pass three elements in the URL:

• The start date
• The end date (if different from the start date)
• The "master" event_id

For example, if you want to display occurrence data for 2013-08-19 (for master event "123"), make a URL like this:

http://mysite.com/calendar/event/2013/08/09/123 

...and use {exp:calendar:cal} to "zoom in" on that occurrence:

<h3>Occurrence details:</h3>
{exp:calendar:cal 
   date_range_start="{segment_3}-{segment_4}-{segment_5}" 
   date_range_end="{segment_3}-{segment_4}-{segment_5}"
   pad_short_weeks="n"
   event_id="{segment_6}"
}
   {events}
       {event_title} occurrence data:<br />
       Starts on  {event_start_date format="%Y-%m-%d"}<br />
       Ends on  {event_end_date format="%Y-%m-%d"}<br />
   {/events}
{/exp:calendar:cal}

Of course you can change the structure of the URL to be

http://mysite.com/calendar/event/2013-08-09/123

...and use {exp:calendar:cal} accordingly:

{exp:calendar:cal 
   date_range_start="{segment_3}" 
   date_range_end="{segment_3}"
   pad_short_weeks="n"
   event_id="{segment_4}"
}
// the rest of the code...