Google Calendar API Sucks

I've been building a little enterprise app at work to deal with network maintenances and it has a good deal of Google Calendar integration.

Please tell me if this makes sense to you..

When creating an event you get an event object back with all the details, which looks like this:

json

{
  "kind": "calendar#event",
  "etag": "\"3146056453636000\"",
  "id": "durpeh8quqetb8iunbrhlukg24",
  "status": "confirmed",
  "htmlLink": "https://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=ZHVycGVoOHF.....",
  "created": "2019-11-06T08:17:06.000Z",
  "updated": "2019-11-06T08:17:06.818Z",
  "summary": "NT-580 - Maintenance Retn CID 010925",
  "description": " Maintenance for <b>Retn</b> on deren CID: \"<b>WL-900951-1.DE.FKT.NTL-UA.KIV.NTL-10G</b>\".<br><br> Affected Newtelco CIDs: <b>010925</b><br><br>Source: <a href=\"https://demo.newtelco.dev/maintenance?id=580\">NT-580</a>",
  "creator": {
    "email": "felix@newtelco.de",
    "displayName": "Felix W"
  },
  "organizer": {
    "email": "newtelco.de_abc123@group.calendar.google.com",
    "displayName": "Newtelco Maintenance",
    "self": true
  },
  "start": {
    "dateTime": "2019-11-15T00:00:00+01:00",
    "timeZone": "Europe/Berlin"
  },
  "end": {
    "dateTime": "2019-11-15T05:00:00+01:00",
    "timeZone": "Europe/Berlin"
  },
  "iCalUID": "abc123@google.com",
  "sequence": 0,
  "attendees": [
    {
      "email": "service@newtelco.de",
      "displayName": "Service",
      "responseStatus": "needsAction"
    }
  ],
  "reminders": {
    "useDefault": true
  }
}

Which ID do you think is the actual eventID that you want to save for later user?

The one called id ? ...wrong.

The one called iCalUID ? ...wrong.

In fact, its the ID which is appended as a query param to the URL in the field htmlLink.

You have to parse this URL and extract the eid parameter just to save the Calendar ID 🤦‍♂️