Bug: All Day events don't have correct end time.

Okay, I think I’ve figured out why this bug occurs only for brand-new, unrevised posts.

Being as lazy as I am, for all-day events I just set the “Start Date / Time:” drop-down selection to the date of my event and let the program validate the “End Date / Time:” for me.

This bug seems to occur because the function “addEventMeta( $postId )” sets the “EventEndDate” for all-day events first, then it validates that “start date < end date” second. So in other words, it sets the 23:59:00 time for all-day events first, but then this gets re-written back to 00:00:00 when it later validates that the event end date should be later than the start date.

Current code, lines 856-861 in the-events-calendar-class.php:

// sanity check that start date < end date
$startTimestamp = strtotime( $_POST['EventStartDate'] );
$endTimestamp 	= strtotime( $_POST['EventEndDate'] );
if ( $startTimestamp > $endTimestamp ) {
	$_POST['EventEndDate'] = $_POST['EventStartDate'];
}

Line 860 should be changed to this so it preserves the time at 23:59:00 or whatever it was before, and the validation only changes the YYYY-MM-DD portion of the event’s end date:

$_POST['EventEndDate'] = substr_replace( $_POST['EventStartDate'], substr( $_POST['EventEndDate'], -8 ), -8 );

I think this should fix it. I’ve been looking directly at the MySQL “wp_postmeta” table to first detect the bug and see if the above fix works and all seems okay now.

After thinking about it, there is still potential for problems with this fix. For example, if the event is not an all-day event and the original start and end times were this:

2011-05-10 10:00:00 (start)
2011-01-01 08:00:00 (end)

the modified code will fix it to this, which is still invalid:

2011-05-10 10:00:00 (start)
2011-05-01 08:00:00 (end)

The end time is still before the start time. So after fixing the YYYY-MM-DD portion, the revised time needs to be checked again to see the end time is after the start time. Repeating the original test after the modified test should be a good final fix for that.

// sanity check that start date < end date
$startTimestamp = strtotime( $_POST['EventStartDate'] );
$endTimestamp 	= strtotime( $_POST['EventEndDate'] );
if ( $startTimestamp > $endTimestamp ) {
	$_POST['EventEndDate'] = substr_replace( $_POST['EventStartDate'], substr( $_POST['EventEndDate'], -8 ), -8 );
}
$endTimestamp 	= strtotime( $_POST['EventEndDate'] );
if ( $startTimestamp > $endTimestamp ) {
	$_POST['EventEndDate'] = $_POST['EventStartDate'];
}

I haven’t tested this code yet, but will report back later on what I find.

Okay, I’ve got new code I’m happy with:

// sanity check that start date < end date
$startTimestamp = strtotime( $_POST['EventStartDate'] );
$endTimestamp 	= strtotime( $_POST['EventEndDate'] );
if ( $startTimestamp > $endTimestamp ) {
	$_POST['EventEndDate'] = substr_replace( $_POST['EventStartDate'], substr( $_POST['EventEndDate'], -8 ), -8 );
	$endTimestamp 	= strtotime( $_POST['EventEndDate'] );
	if ( $startTimestamp > $endTimestamp ) {
		$_POST['EventEndDate'] = $_POST['EventStartDate'];
	}
}

This is slightly cleaner than the previous because properly set start and end times only get tested once, rather than twice. Incorrectly set start and end times get first tested if dates only need to be fixed, then it gets tested again to see if the time-of-day needs to be fixed too.

I tested it with these pairs of start and end date/times:

All day event:
2011-08-08 18:00:00 (start)
2011-05-08 18:00:00 (end)

2011-08-08 18:00:00 (start)
2011-05-08 13:00:00 (end)

2011-08-08 18:00:00 (start)
2011-05-08 21:00:00 (end)

All entries resulted in valid entries where “start time < end time” on the first try without any revisions, and all-day events properly started at 00:00:00 and ended at 23:59:00.