Can one also recognize Calendar status types other than available?

[mmoser]

I would like to use Tasker to silence alarms during meetings and other events.
In principle this works OK (as shown and explained on several sites) using a condition of
State -> App -> Calendar Entry
Set Available to No, choose calendar by long-pressing on your Calendar.
Done.

BUT: I have many whole-day calendar entries where I mark days as "Out-of-office", i.e. days off.
On such days the above profile silences my phone for the entire day which is definitely NOT what I want!

What I really want is to silence it during events that are marked as "Busy". All others with states available, out-of-office, tentative, ... should NOT trigger that rule.

But it seems one can only select "Available" (with condition Yes/No/Any) in Tasker.
Is there any possibility to base that trigger not on "Available" but on "Busy"?

 

[Hadron]

Which calendar app is showing all of these other states, or what system are you syncing with? Because Google calendars only know the states "busy" and "available", and "busy" is just a way of saying "not available". Hence for a Google calendar there would be no difference between selecting "busy == true" and "available == false".

Since most calendars on Android devices will be Google calendars it's likely this is written with them in mind. Indeed on my device Tasker only shows Google calendars when I try to set up a profile to act on their events: none of my Exchange, Outlook or unsynched calendars (which do support other states) are known to Tasker (or at least not the "Calendar Event" option).

So it sounds like you are using a status that Google calendars don't support ("out of office"), and my guess is that when you sync that with your Google caneldar it is being translated by the Google machinery into "not available". The only work-around I can think of is not to use that status on those days (which may work fine if you don't share the calendar, might not suit you if you do and rely on others seeing the status rather than the title).

 

[mmoser]

Which calendar app is showing all of these other states, or what system are you syncing with?...

It's a Calendar called "BusinessCalendar" which is synced with Outlook on my desktop.
And Outlook supports "Available", Tentative", "Busy", "Out-of-Office" and newly (since v2016) also "Working Elsewhere".

Funny enough in the calendar selection the Calendar is also prefixed with "Google:"

Would be cool if Tasker could somehow accommodate that. I guess people syncing their calendars with Outlook are not exactly an exotic minority...

 

[Hadron]

Yes, I know Business Calendar, and if you try to create an event in it what options do you have? On my device the only Calendar app that supports availability other than available or not is Nine (which is written primarily for Exchange), and other calendar apps don't support these statuses even for calendars shared via that app (e.g. I just used it to set status "out of office" for an appointment on an Outlook calendar and it appears as "available" to other calendar apps).

My guess is that the calendars are prefixed by "Google" because something, either on your phone or computer is syncing your Outlook calendars with Google and it is via that route that Tasker can see them.

If you want this changed you should contact Tasker's developer - they are the only person who can change it.

 

[mmoser]

Well, I can only reiterate that on my system (Samsung Galaxy Note 9 / Android 10) the BusinessCalendar app (v2.37.9) offers the same "Show me as" values that I know from Outlook, i.e. "Available", "Tentative", "Busy" and "Out of Office". And it not only displays those values on entries synced over from my laptop but I can also select these when creating a new appointment on the phone.
And I definitely do NOT sync via Google but directly with an Exchange server. Syncing contacts or calendar data with Google is a no-go for me!