Google Calendar CalDav Delegation on iPhone OS 3.0

A couple of weeks ago I saw this article on Mac OS X Hints which pointed to this thread on Apple’s discussion forum which had an interesting suggestion for getting delegates to sync by way of CalDav to your iPhone. The solution that was proposed on the board implied just enough about how the CalDav protocol works for delegation that I began to believe that the same general technique could be applied to any CalDav calendar, such as Google Calendar or Google Apps. I filed this information away because I hadn’t yet updated to iPhone OS 3.0, but planned to try it once I had.

Fast forward two weeks, I updated my iPhone’s OS to 3.0 today and I decided to give my theory a whirl. The short story: it works! You can sync all of your CalDav delegate calendars directly to your iPhone, with the caveat that you must enter each one of them as a separate CalDav calendar.

To add a delegate’s calendar you’ll have to start by creating a duplicate calendar of your personal one, except set the description of the calendar to describe the delegated calendar. Once that sets itself up all you have to do is go to:

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [Delegate Calendar] > Advanced Settings

Change the account URL from:
https://www.google.com:443/calendar/dav/YOUR_USERNAME/user

To:
https://www.google.com:443/calendar/dav/DELEGATE_USERNAME/user

(With Google Calendar and Google Apps the username is always that person’s full email address.)

This gives you your privilege level access to that delegate’s calendar and allows you to sync and stay up to date.