Add to Calendar links not appearing with Recurring formatter

Update: It doesn't work if the "Force chronological" checkbox is checked. The desired behavior would be if you could select "Force chronological," have one tidy Add to Calendar link that includes any and all recurring rules and individual dates, and have all the recurring rules display chronologically below.

Assigning myself for maintainer evaluation...

The desired behavior would be if you could select "Force chronological," have one tidy Add to Calendar link that includes any and all recurring rules and individual dates, and have all the dates display chronologically below.

There may be a need for the maintainers to more clearly investigate what role the "Force chronological" option, whose help text reads "Merge together all recurring rule instances and single events, and sort chronologically before subsetting as a single group," should have in relation to the recurring rule. Importantly, the "Force chronological" option does NOT come from this module. It comes from smart_date.

I believe you can achieve the "desired behavior" above as follows:
1. Do not tick the "Force chronological" option.
2. Do enable the "Recurring rule" Add To Calendar display
3. Do not enable the "Individual Dates" Add To Calendar display.

This results is "one tidy Add to Calendar link that includes the recurring rules in its iCal/Google Calendar/Outlook data, and displays the upcoming dates chronologically below that, as shown below:

Screenshot of add to calendar link →

If that's not the output you're going for, please clarify!

Thanks for confirming those steps. To clarify, what's making this somewhat more complex is that the sites I support use an unlimited-value smart_date field, and regularly have rules like "Weekly on Thursday, 1:20 - 2:20pm" and "Weekly on Monday, 2:30 - 3:30am" stored together in the same field (sometimes with exception dates removed and non-repeating added dates too).

Without the "Force chronological" option enabled, this becomes a bit hairy (at best):

From a user perspective, it'd be cleaner to continue using the "Force chronological" option, and have a single "Add all to calendar" button merging any multiple rules and assorted dates, like so,

The "Force Chronological" option is a formatting shorthand, but that doesn't mean the actual iCalendar spec supports what you want to do. The only way to have a single "add to calendar" link for multiple, merged recurring rules would be for the output to contain multiple RRULE values. According to the RFC anything after the first RRULE should be ignored, so I expect that calendar clients would be inconsistent on whether or not you would get the expected result.