Two lots of events getting shown

Hi Alec,

I’m looking into it. There was a bug fix while back to RDATEs which might have affected it. I can see for eg that there is an original monthly RRULE with some mods and that the 21 July is a modification of that (that date has a duplicate).

Also we had someone else recently who had some odd things happening when they were using recurring events with lots of modified instances in a google calendar (they had 3200 events). Each modification is a separate vevent with recurrence id on the original recurring event. Problems went away when the source calendar was cleaned up so the plugin didn’t have some much old stuf to check through. I’m only mentioning this because that ics file has 7200 Vevents each of which have to be parsed and processed on each display.

So if you don’t have too many current events, an interim solution till a fix goes up may be to setup some clean events (not modified instances of recurring events)

hi- sorry 7200/2 = 3600 (search was showing begin and end vevent)

Hi Alec, looks like a typo got introduced in recurrence instance matching.

In line 1206 (or thereabouts) the YdHIS should be YmDHis

$recdate = $recdateobj->format('YmdHis');

A fix with this in will be up soon.
Also please note
1) that your ics file is very large, my local server was timing out when trying to refresh it remotely, I had to download it and refresh locally. As you continue to add and modify events, the file will grow and that situation will get worse. It is also not easy to delete old stuff from google calendar. (search it!)

2) you have bad/mismatched html in your event descriptions. An ics event description is not really supposed to contain html. My plugin will attempt to cope with it (although not the mismatching). Some calendar applications may show the raw html.

3)with a complex mix of modified recurring events and modified recurring instances, the risk of calendar applications not interpreting the instances in the same way is high. For example: one of your recurring rules had as many mods made to it as an recurrence instance had had. The rule might also have a mod later than the instance. For now if there is an instance, the plugin will assume that that is the latest – however I can see that it is possible if there are lots of mods being made to instances to get the whole thing in a confusing state. If you are ever confused you could create a test evet list showing the recurrence id, sequence to see which the plugin is showing:
like https://i.imgur.com/2W7qHPF.png

Bit technical, but raised some of the problems that might arise with various calendar applications if one has complex interrelating modifications. https://icalevents.com/4437-correct-handling-of-uid-recurrence-id-sequence/

Hi,

Wow thank you very much for the quick response, review and plugin update. I have updated to the new version and it has resolved the issue. That is great.

1. Also I very much appreciate your comments about the large ics file. Indeed I have been running the calendar adding and modifying for quite a few years so that will be why – I just never knew it had that type of impact. I will take a look further to see what – if anything I can do to fix this.

2. I will check for the bad/mismatched html. I mainly only use this with the standard Google Calendar iframe or you plugin – but it’s useful to know it may impact anyone who does hook into it.

3. I think I understand the point here and you may have mentioned this in an earlier support query. The use of the calendar is pretty much the same and in a linear manner – but I’ll take that on board to try to minimse any potential. I’ve setup a test page in case I need it in the future

Again many thanks for the resolution and feedback.

Alec

Hi

Reading your blog article it implies that the paid for plugin could help me solve issue 1! Is that correct.

Would the data still reside in Google Calendar or come across into WordPress? I’ve never been sure whether the paid plugin gives you a full calendar app in WordPress and replaces the need for Google Calendar – not sure I want to at the moment.

Alec

In paid plugin it is easier to see all your events (wp posts) and delete older ones, or no longer required ones. THis avoids the ever expanding ics file problem. There is also tool to delete events that have no recurrences in the future anymore.

The event creation works differently from google. If you want to have a infinite recurring event and then create ad hoc exceptions, you’d need to add an ‘EX-DATE’ to the recurring event – it’s in the input screen near the bottom and then create the new instance separately. This may change in the future, but right now very few people use recurring events the way you are doing, so priority to make it more seamless like google is low.

You can try creation process out at test.icalevents.com