WTH can't I trigger automations offset from a calendar event's start time without editing the title of the event?

It’s always been super complicated and “hacky” to edit the titles of my Google Calendar and CalDAV calendar entries to get automations to trigger at certain offsets based on the event’s start time. For example, to be able to trigger an automation 10 minutes before a meeting (a TTS announcement, for example), the docs say to edit the title of the event so that it’s:

“Very important meeting !!-10”

Then I can use the offset_reached attribute in an automation.

I have events that auto-populate to my calendar from emails and I don’t want to (and often times just can’t) edit the titles of every one of them so that my automation triggers.

WTH is this not more elegant/easy in HA?

The whole calendar concept needs a refresh. It currently only lists one event, and has no concept of much of the metadata attached to an event.
In the ical custom component which I have been fiddling with, we add a number of sensors for the next “n” events, so you can list them, use them in automations etc.

What you can do, is to use a template trigger and compare sensor.time to the start attribute. But the calendar integration should really have a way to understand the regular notification settings on an event.

Agreed, it does feel like the whole calendar integration is a bit of a hack. I was hopeful that it was getting some more attention back in 0.110 with the panel that was added.

And that’s what I do now with sensor.time. Definitely not ideal.

Might need to have a look at the iCal custom component for now!