How can I send an invite with rich text?

Question

Hi all; I am writing a web app (using Blazor) and need to send users a calendar invite when they sign up for an event. I am creating .ics files fine. But there's no rich text in them that I can see. Is there a way to put rich text in an .ics file for the description? And if so, how? And/or, does Outlook prefer a file format other than .ics? And if so, where is that format documented? thanks - dave

Answer 1

Hi David!

It actuallly isn't supported in the iCalendar specification. But Outlook is capable of understanding HTML in the body of an ics

Outlook uses a number of these X- fields for various things; for HTML-formatted descriptions, it uses X-ALT-DESC and specifies FMTTYPE=text/html .

Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to support it. I also have an application but in React with an .NET backend. I've tried this too, but it seems only Outlook understands this. We solved it by adding a link to the body that goes to the dynamically created event page to provide more information

Greetingz.

Answer 2

The native format for Outlook invites is a .msg file. There's a library for it (haven't tried it yet).