Pull public event data from Google Calendar - google-api

Question

I may be over thinking this a bit. On my web site, I would like to user certain data from my public google calendar. My plan is to pull it on the server side so I can do things like process it, cache it and format it the way I want.
I've been looking at using the Google Api libraries, but I can't get past any of the authorization hurdles. A service account sounds like what I really want, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how that works in this situation.
The old GDATA apis would be ok, but I'm not very keen on using them because they look fairly deprecated at this point by the newer libraries.
Since it is all public data, I'm hoping there is a simpler way to get to the event data that I'm looking for.
In case it matters, my site is Asp.Net (MVC).
Update
Ok, I was definitely way over thinking it. See my answer.

Answer 1

Now that RSS has been removed from Google Calendar, I've been in search of an easy replacement. I dug around and found the following in the Google Calendar API that seems to do the trick: calendar.events.list
Calendar Events List in Google API Explorer is a good place to get started with the different parameters and options - and it'll build you an example request string. You can see that I specified a minimum time of 2/5/2016, sort it by the start time, and show deleted events.
GET https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/[CALENDAR ID HERE]/events?
orderBy=startTime&showDeleted=true&singleEvents=true&
timeMin=2016-02-05T00%3A00%3A00Z&key={YOUR_API_KEY}
Results are in JSON so you can parse it in your favorite programming language, ASP.NET or whatever. Result looks like:
{
"kind": "calendar#events",
"etag": "\"123456789123456\"",
"summary": "My Public Calendar",
"updated": "2016-01-29T14:38:29.392Z",
"timeZone": "America/New_York",
"accessRole": "reader",
"defaultReminders": [ ],
"items": [ {
"kind": "calendar#event",
"etag": "\"9876543210987654\"",
"id": "sfdljgsdkjgheakrht4sfdjfscd",
"status": "confirmed",
"htmlLink": "https://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=sdgtukhysrih489759sdkjfhwseihty7934hyt94hdorujt3q95uy689u9yhfdgnbiwe5hy",
"created": "2015-07-06T16:21:59.000Z",
"updated": "2015-07-06T16:21:59.329Z",
"summary": "In-Service Day",
"location": "Maui, HI",
"creator": {
"email": "abra#cadabra.com",
"displayName": "Joe Abra"
},
"organizer": {
"email": "cadabra.com_sejhrgtuiwerghwi4hruh#group.calendar.google.com",
"displayName": "My Public Calendar",
"self": true
},
"start": {
"date": "2016-02-08"
},
"end": {
"date": "2016-02-09"
},
"transparency": "transparent",
"iCalUID": "isdt56y784g78ty86tgsfdgh#google.com",
"sequence": 0
},
{
...
}]
}

Answer 2

One good answer to this (the one I'm going with) is to simply use the calendar's public address to get the data. This is an option that I had forgotten about and it works fine for this particular situation.
You can find the url for the data if you go to the settings for a particular calendar and pick the format you want (I went with xml for this situation.)
The data that you get out of this service is very human-reader optimized, but I can make it work for what I'm doing.