Importing Events vs. Subscribing

When you view the Web page for a single event, our calendar system offers two different ways to add an event to your personal calendar: Importing and Subscribing.

How should you choose which to use?

Importing

To import an event is to copy its current listing into your personal calendar. This is a one-time operation. Think of it as jotting down the details you see.

Subscribing

To subscribe to an event (or list of events) is to tell your calendar software to retrieve the information about the event (or list of events) right now and to periodically check with our servers to see if there have been any updates.

Most lists of events on our website are actually the result of searches against our database, for instance http://apps.alexandriava.gov/Calendar/?show=OHA lists events from Historic Alexandria that occur today or on some future date. Subscribing to a list like this will cause your calendar system to add new events as they're entered into our database, usually within a day or so.

Reasons to use Import

You can set reminder alarms for events.

Imported events look like any other events on your personal calendar.

By comparison, "subscribed" calendars are often treated differently. For instance, in Microsoft Outlook 2010, subscribed calendars appear next to your personal calendar in a different color, and you have to manually "merge" the display of personal and subscribed calendars in order to see subscribed events next to events on your personal calendar.

Imported events are more likely to be visible on every view of your calendar.

Subscribed calendars often aren't visible on mobile devices or "web access" views, for instance.

Reasons to Subscribe

Your calendar will be kept up-to-date automatically

If we change something in our event listing, the change will appear on your calendar automatically, usually within a day or so.

New events will be added automatically

If you search for events that match criteria you're interested in, for instance Planning & Zoning events related to the Parker-Gray neighborhood, and subscribe to that list of events, your calendar will automatically find new events within a day or so of our adding them to the calendar.