Calendar feeds
A calendar feed lets you subscribe your phone or desktop calendar app to your own assigned jobs, so they show up alongside everything else on your calendar without opening the portal.
What it is
The feed is a personal, read-only iCal URL, secured by a token rather than a login. Once subscribed, each scheduled job appears as an event with a one-hour reminder, and every job’s statutory investigate-by deadline appears as its own all-day event so it’s never buried in a list. This is one-way only — HousingSurvey Pro reads nothing back from your calendar, and there is no two-way sync with Outlook or Google Calendar.
Before you start
Subscribing needs live work-orders and scheduling permission at View level or above, on the same effective scope.
How to do it
- Mint your personal calendar token from the portal — this returns a feed URL unique to you.
- Add that URL as a subscribed calendar in Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, using each app’s own “subscribe by URL” option rather than a one-off import.
- New and rescheduled jobs appear automatically the next time your calendar app refreshes the subscription — most apps do this every few hours.
- If you need to revoke access — a lost device, for example — mint a new token; the previous one stops working immediately.
How it integrates
Every request against the feed re-checks your live permissions and membership status at that exact moment, not just at the point the token was minted — if you’re removed from a role, or your work-order or scheduling access is downgraded, the feed stops serving your jobs on the very next refresh, with no separate revocation step needed. See The schedule calendar for how jobs land on the schedule in the first place, and The case lifecycle end to end for what each job’s own statutory deadline means once it shows up as an all-day event.
Common problems
- My calendar app isn’t showing new jobs. Most calendar apps only refresh a subscribed URL periodically, not instantly — check your app’s own sync interval rather than assuming the feed is broken.
- The feed suddenly stopped working. If your work-order or scheduling permission was changed or your token was reminted, the previous feed URL stops resolving — mint a fresh token and re-subscribe.
- I need this to update live the moment something changes. iCal subscriptions are pull-based by design — for anything closer to real time, see Webhooks.