Durations and Periods

What's the duration or the period of the event?

VisualCard offers a duration parser that allows you to parse a string representation of the duration as specified in the ISO-8601:2004 format. A single function that you can use is GetDurationSpan() from the vCardCommonTools class.

Once parsing is done, if the syntax is valid, it returns a tuple of both the DateTimeOffset that describes a resulting end date added to either a current date or a specified root date, and a TimeSpan that describes the processed duration.

For vCalendar 2.0, month and year specifiers are not supported, but vCalendar 1.0 does. You can review the duration specifier here.

Periods describe a start date and an end date for a specific time ranged events, and can be described as a precise period of time. You can see its specification from the vCard 2.0 spec here. GetTimePeriod() allows you to parse a period string and convert it to an appropriate TimePeriod class that has the following properties:

• StartDate: A DateTimeOffset instance that contains an event start date

• EndDate: A DateTimeOffset instance that contains an event end date

• Duration: A TimeSpan instance that contains a computed duration of a time period