Is there a way to easily import from an ICAL (google calendar) to an Access table

We have an Access 2003 based business management system, which includes a very basic event calendar, which logs what marketing actions have been taken against events, and sends a couple of automated blasts to Twitter. What I'd like to 开发者_StackOverflowdo is have this program read in any events from our google calendar's ical file, ideally without having to download the file. The event would then be stored locally in the Access database, and wouldn't need to stay in sync with the Google calendar.

Any ideas on ways to import ical files straight from the server would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance PG

First all the technical spec for ICAL is RFC 5545.

It is a pretty straightforward text format to parse. That's probably why there are few libraries in any language to read ICAL files.

Note that it is impossible to get data in a file format from a server without downloading the file. The definition of "download" is to read a stream of bytes across a network that are formatted according to the rules of one or another file formats.

However, it may be possible to do screen scraping or to hook into a Google calendar API and just get the events that you are interested in. If you use the Google Calendar API feed then that would not be downloading since you are not transferring the entire calendar file. Even though it is ATOMpub XML format for the feeds you probably would not need a full-blown XML parser for this small amount of data.