CalDAV sync for external clients is not clearly documented

[Carsons-Eels]

Before You Submit

• I have checked for existing issues and pull requests related to my suggestion.
• [N/A] I have posted on the Nextcloud Community Help Forum if my suggestion is a troubleshooting scenario or I'm unsure about the solution.

Type of Suggestion

Suggesting an improvement

Relevant Documentation Links

• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_thunderbird.html
• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_windows10.html
• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_kde.html
• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_osx.html
• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_ios.html

Summary

User manual does not consistently document the CalDAV URL formats needed to connect to Nextcloud

Details

The Thunderbird sync page instructs users to enter their "Location (Server URL)" but never specifies what that URL should actually look like.

To quote directly:

1. Go to the calendar view in Thunderbird and select the New Calendar… button at the bottom of the left side panel.
2. Choose "On the network"
3. Type your Username and Location (Server URL), then click on Find Calendars.
4. Choose which calendars you want to add and click Subscribe

Users need to know that the URL format is:

# Individual calendars
https://<server>/remote.php/dav/calendars/<username>/<calendar-name>/

# Auto-discovery of all calendars
https://<server>/remote.php/dav/calendars/<username>/

This information is also difficult to discover in the app itself. It's not clear that you need the "Internal link" because the description of that "A private link that can be used with external clients" does not sufficiently clarify how this is intended to be used. Which external clients? Why?

I realized later upon reviewing the documentation for the other external clients that:

• The Windows 10 documentation does document this correctly, but it's not intuitive for a user to go hunting through every doc in that section.
• The osx docs also make no mention of the URL format.
• The KDE docs do have the format in the document, but it is not machine tractable because it is in the image rather than the text. So a user with a visual disability will not be able to find that out.
• The iOS docs do mention the subscription URL for the user, but not how to subscribe to specific calendars. I'm not certain whether you can do that through iOS, I use Linux and can't verify if this is possible.

Suggested improvement

Add the CalDAV (and CardDAV) URL formats explicitly to:

1. The Thunderbird sync page
2. The Calendar app page (in a section on connecting external clients)
3. Mention that the correct URL for a specific calendar can be obtained via the calendar's mouseover pencil menu → "Internal link" in the Calendar web UI

Related Issues

#6740

Additional Notes

I only figured it out by trial and error to get the specific calendar URL, and then making a further guess that I could cut off the <calendar-name> from that URL to subscribe to all of them. This ended up taking me over an hour to set up in Thunderbird, and it should have been extremely simple.