VALARM Description Is Not Showing

Question

I am trying to create a VALARM for a VEVENT with customized VALARM message. So based on RFC5545, I just have to set action to DISPLAY and set my customized message in the DESCRIPTION field of the VALARM component.

"When the action is "DISPLAY", the alarm MUST also include a "DESCRIPTION" property, which contains the text to be displayed when the alarm is triggered."

However, even if I set the DESCRIPTION property, the message is still not being displayed in the alarm popup.

BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
TRIGGER;VALUE=DURATION:-PT15M
DESCRIPTION:Test Message
END:VALARM

I have tried it on my iphone calendar application and Mozilla Thunderbird Lightning Addon.

Any feedback is greatly appreaciated.

Thank You.

Answer 1

The formatting of your VALARM is correct, so the only logical answer is that whatever iCalendar application you are using, does not support DESCRIPTION (which is something I see on occasion)

Answer 2

You should do it the other way round: Create a calendar event with your calendar application, export it to file and see how it looks like.

That way I solved a similar problem: I spent some time trying to import calendar events to my brand new Android 5 phone. After import all alarms were lost. It turned out that the calendar app does not fully understand ICS files (iCal Version 2.0) but the old VCS format (iCal Version 1.0). Strange but true.