Enable Custom Calendar Reminders with the Nylas Scheduler

Enable Custom Calendar Reminders with the Nylas Scheduler

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It’s 2020 and the new year, as always, is full of enterprising resolutions and planning for the year ahead! This year, help your users streamline their scheduling by building native scheduling tools into your app. 

The Nylas scheduler provides a nifty way to embed a pre-built scheduling UI into your application – we call this instant integration

Let’s dig into one of the handy features of the Nylas Scheduler integration that will quickly enable you to boost user’s productivity and help them never miss a meeting: event reminders

Creating Custom Reminders for Your Scheduled Meetings

With everyone’s hectic schedules, it never hurts to have a little help via custom reminders. So how do we build them?

First, let’s take a look at how to make an API request to create a Scheduling Page:

curl -X POST https://schedule.api.nylas.com/manage/pages -d '

        { 

         "name":"Team Scheduling Page", 

         "slug": "team-1234",

         "access_tokens": ["XXXX"],

         "config": {

         "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",

         "event": {

         "duration": 45,

         "location": "Sightglass Coffee, SOMA",

         "title": "Intro Meeting"

         },

         "appearance": {

         "color": "#ff0000"

         },

         "booking": {

         "opening_hours": [{

         "days": ["M", "T", "W", "R", "F"],

         "start": "09:00",

         "end": "17:00"

         }]

         },

         "reminders": []

         }

        }'

In the code snippet above, you can see that there is a ‘reminders’ attribute within the ‘config’ object that takes an array. The array takes one or more objects with each object correlating to a reminder. Each reminder is essentially configuring a scheduler webhook that allows you to build your custom logic for upcoming bookings. 

Configuring Scheduler Webhooks

To configure scheduler webhooks, pass in an object with ‘delivery_method: webhook’, like so:

{

  ...

  "reminders": [

    {

      "delivery_method": "webhook",

      "delivery_recipient": "both",

      "time_before_event": 60, // minutes

      "webhook_url": "https://example.com/api/booking-webhook"

    }

  ]

    ...

}

This particular reminder will send reminders to the participants 60 minutes before the meeting takes place. How does this work? The scheduling API will trigger a POST request to the URL you provide in ‘webhook_url’. The config object also has ‘booking’ and ‘page’ attributes that provide information and context needed to send emails or perform other business logic. Here is an example of how that POST body may look:

  {

      "page": {

        "name": "1:1 Coffee Meeting",

        "slug": "test-page"

        "config": {

          ...

        },

      },

      "booking": {

        "id": 50,

        "title": "Intro Meeting",

        "edit_hash": "f5gDjm-DpR2O-YC85Ie9iA",

        "is_confirmed": true,

        "location": "Sightglass Coffee, SOMA",

        "recipient_email": "[email protected]",

        "recipient_name": "Ben Gotow",

        "recipient_tz": "America/Chicago",

        "start_time": 1563473700,

        "end_time": 1563476400,

        "additional_field_values": {

          "favorite_foods": "Broccoli"

        }

      }

    }

And just like that, you’ve made sure that all meeting participants will get a friendly reminder. As you can see, it took only a few steps to implement reminders through scheduler webhooks – a great reminder, you might say, that one of the easiest ways to make an effective enhancement in your scheduling tool is to take advantage of the convenient features the Nylas Scheduler offers.

Ready to start making more improvements to your scheduling tool using Nylas Scheduler?

Get Started – Get up and running with the Nylas Scheduler. 

Integrate the Scheduler with your App  – Learn more about Instant Integration’s pre-built UI and Smart Integration.

Scheduler Code Examples – View In-depth example applications written in Python and Node.

How Nylas Works – Take a look at the Nylas architecture to see how we sync billions of emails.

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