Subscribe for Outlook gives odd results

Hi @jfortun,

This may be a bug in the way Outlook.com imports the specific file of events. The genreal ICS file for your calendar should be the same.

Can you try an alternative method of exporting to your Outlook calendar?

I went to your Timely calendar and clicked on the Subscribe button, then “Add to Timely Calendar” to download the ICS file — this is a general file of events that contains all your calendar’s events.

You can then import this file into your Outlook calendar as follows:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/import-or-subscribe-to-a-calendar-in-outlook-com-cff1429c-5af6-41ec-a5b4-74f2c278e98c

Two issues:
1. importing a downloaded ICS file does not subscribe you to a calendar, it just imports the existing events, which is suboptimal

2. even when I do import the ICS file, events are missing. For example October in the hosted calendar shows 8 events. when I import the ICS file as you suggested, I only get 3 events for the entire month.

Thanks for your continued help.

Hi @jfortun,

I did some testing on your WordPress calendar and exporting the events into test calendars. The events are properly listed in the feed and the ICS export files.

Can you try manually importing this feed link instead:

https://wheatonmontessori.org/?plugin=all-in-one-event-calendar&controller=ai1ec_exporter_controller&action=export_events

No luck with the url either. Only some events get imported.

I opened the ICS file with a text editor and did see that the missing events were present so I looked into what was different between the events that were imported and the events that were not. It looks like events that do not get imported contain the RDATE field but no RRULE field. According to Microsoft, Outlook and Exchange require RRULE to properly process reoccurring events. It looks like the plug-in only outputs RDATE. As a test I manually modified a few of the reoccurring events in the ics file to remove the RDATE field and those events imported- though of course only as a discreet event.

Not sure what can be done about that. I thought I would check the plug-in settings to see if I could force it to export reoccurring meetings as individual meetings but now for some reason the plug-in settings won’t load (I get a 500 internal server error). The plug-in itself seems to be working- just the settings page won’t load. I am a parent volunteer trying to help the school fix the issue- I don’t do a lot of wordpress – my IT experience is in other fields- so I am not sure what to do about the settings error. As for the issue with Outlook, I am hoping there is some fix that does not require the school admin to reenter every event as discreet events. Thoughts? I appreciate your help on this.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by jfortun.

Hi @jfortun,

Nice find. The repeat can be normal, or custom. A custom repeat date uses the RDATE field, and if it’s just a regular recurring date in the event, the RRULE property is used.

Just like Apple calendar, it looks like Microsoft doesn’t support custom repeat dates either.

The easy solution is to look at your events that are missing, and redo the repeat dates on the events.

A custom repeat date is set when you manually select repeat dates. If the dates can be set up as regular recurrences, the RRULE property is used.

Let me know if this is a feasible solution.

I’ll talk to the school about it. Thanks for the clarification.