I went to AWS Reinvent this year, and I wanted my registered events to show up on my personal calendar. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t implement an iCal export for your registered events. So I took these steps to get them.

Getting the Information

1. I used the network inspector to find a response that had my events on the calendar page. It seems to be one of the graphql calls shown in the inspector.

   

2. I then copied and pasted the response into a text file, and used jq to explore the information. I found that my events were separated into 2 fields, mySessions and myFavorites.

jq '.data.event.mySessions.items + .data.event.myFavorites.items' data.json

This gave me my information as a JSON file that I can import into NodeJS.

Building the iCal file

I decided to use NodeJS for this, because it’s relatively easy to find an iCal library, and I can easily load my JSON file via require. I then just simply mapped the event entries to their proper locations per the library. I also needed to add a timezone since the JSON from the graphql used UTC time, and I wanted it to show up as the given timezone. You can peruse the code below for details.

const events = require('./events.json')
const ical = require('ical-generator')

function makeLocation(x) {
    var room = x.room.name;
    var venue = x.venue.name;

    return `${room} --- ${venue}`;
}

const newEvents = events.map((x) => {
    return {
        title: x.name,
        start: new Date(x.startTime),
        duration: {minutes: x.duration},
        description: x.description,
        location: makeLocation(x),
        geo: {
            lat: 36.114647,
            lon: -115.172813
        },
        timezone: 'America/Los_Angeles'
    }
});

const calendar = ical({name: 'aws reinvent hschmale'})

for (const event of newEvents) {
    calendar.createEvent(event);
}

console.log(calendar);

calendar.save('reinvent.ical');

The saved iCal file can then be exported into Google calendar via their import feature or served up from a HTTP endpoint. I personally prefer to serve it up from the endpoint, as then the events can’t be moved around.

However, I encountered some weirdness with sessions that were moved or something showing up in the wrong location, but overall it worked very well.