Sync Google calendar event data as issues and working time items to YouTrack
Hi,
Our team is planning meetings, days off, self-development and support sessions in personal calendars and in a shared team calendar on Google Workspace. When working on something regularly, we track our time in the corresponding ticket or issue on YouTrack. So far so good.
Now, we could integrate Google Calendar and YouTrack into a third party time tracking service like TimeCamp but we were wondering if this is even necessary. Can't YouTrack already be the single source of truth?
We love YouTrack so far and we assume it could be flexible enough for us to be able to write an API that accepts Google Calendars notifications and sends them to a calendar project on YouTrack, something similar to what services like Albato offer but more custom:
- Add/Update/Delete issues based on calendar events
- Add/Update/Delete working time items to issues based on attendees and event durations, a full-day event accounts for 8 hours
- Add/Update/Delete values in custom fields of issues based on event content (e.g. a string like “Meeting: ” in the beginning of event title)
What do you think of this approach? Are there already proven approaches to this that we should be aware of? Are we completely missing something?
Any kind of feedback or shared experience with this topic would be highly appreciated.
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Hi,
I'm Sergey from the YouTrack team.
This specific option is currently not available. However, we are working on the plugins (apps) feature, which will significantly enhance customization and integration options in YouTrack. This feature will allow any plugin (app) to declare a custom endpoint to be used as a webhook by third-party services. You can vote for this feature or watch it in our public tracker to subscribe to updates—it is expected to be released in the coming months.
For now, you can implement such an integration by polling data from your Google Calendar. This can be achieved using an on-schedule workflow rule that runs on a specific schedule. In the workflow, you can utilize an HTTP module to establish an HTTP connection with a third-party service. For more details, refer to Using REST API Methods in JavaScript Workflows.
For example, you can create a rule that runs every 5 minutes to poll results from the Google Calendar API and then update issue data (work items, fields, create and remove issues) in YouTrack.
Alternatively, you can set up a service that retrieves data from the Google Calendar API, processes it, and posts updates to YouTrack using the YouTrack REST API.
If you have any questions, please let me know.