Day 12: Import calendar data from media center plug-ins

The current blog post is our closing post on the calendar topic. It describes how to import calendar data coming from an external source, such as a media center plug-ins. This is a more demanding post and a topic for advanced users.

If you used Lights-Out 1.x together with a media center software like MediaPortal, you probably also used a plug-in to import calendar data into Lights-Out. The available media center plugins inject their calendar data directly into the old “tasklist.xml” file. This file is found in “c:\programdata\lightsout”.

During the installation of Lights-Out 2.0, old calendar data from “tasklist.xml” is migrated once into the new format and architecture. But any change afterwards to “tasklist.xml” is no longer applied and therefore not visible in Lights-Out 2.0.

Continuously import calendar data

To continuously  import calendar data (or more precisely, import after any change of tasklist.xml), you should download the optional CalendarImport. The download is a simple ZIP archiv.

Next extract the two files:

• AxoNet.LightsOut2.Activity.CalendarImport.dll (the importer)
• AxoNet.LightsOut2.Activity.CalendarImport.dll.json (a configuration file)

Copy these two files into the folder “C:\Program Files\AxoNet Software GmbH\LightsOut2\ThirdParty”. Then restart the Lights-Out service.

With the default settings, any foreign task from “tasklist.xml” is imported and assigned to the server.

Assigning imported calendar data to a client

Some users run their TV recording on a client. To assigned the imported data to a client computer, you have to edit the configuration file. Open “AxoNet.LightsOut2.Activity.CalendarImport.dll.json” in an editor. Replace “server” with the id of a client computer. Be sure to keep the quotes and the comma after the id!

Original configuration:

Sample configuration to assign data to a client:

The id above is only a sample. To get the required id for your system, double click the selected client to open the properties. The id is displayed in the title bar:

In Dashboard you also see the client Id (the key) in the lower details pane.

Disabling or enabling the importer

If you want to stop the import of calendar data, either delete the two files and restart the service or edit the configuration file and set Enabled to false.

Summary

This was out last blog post on the calendar topic. You learned how you can easily import calendar data from the old Lights-Out 1.x format. Tomorrow we will have a short intermezzo and look at two new sources for monitoring. Then we will switch over to an especially relevant topic and talk backup and backup providers.

Here you will find the complete list of all days of our step-by-step series.