Can’t import any events

[John Ridneour]

I’m trying to start over with our calendar by wiping everything clean and using Event Aggregator to sync our Google Calendars with the site with scheduled imports. I began by creating a staging copy of the site so as not to mess up our current calendar in the event this doesn’t work. Then I went through and deleted all old events. Where I’m having the issue is in the importing. I add the iCal format link from google, I hit preview, and the events show up. Then I hit “Save Scheduled Import” and am presented this error message;

Unable to process this import – a breakage or conflict may have resulted in the import halting.

Not sure where to go from here.

I also tried this on the actual site. I went through the exact same steps (minus the deletion of all old events). What happens here is this:

Your scheduled import was saved and the first import is complete!
2 already-imported events were skipped.

I’ve never imported any events before, so i’m not sure why this might be happening either.

I’ve tried disabling all plugins and our custom theme to no avail.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi John,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

As a first troubleshooting step, could you please provide us with your complete system information in a private reply using the instructions found in the following link?

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[John Ridneour]

This reply is private.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi John,

Thanks for providing me with that information.

When you say that you have deleted events, have you done so from your database?  You can try a query like the following in order to do so:

https://gist.github.com/nefeline/86e5a52401b22dc6ab6129ad869ce892

In addition, can you provide me with the URL that you are trying to import, so that I can do some testing on my end?

Also, can you enable and check the Event Log under Events < Help to see if you see anything unusual?

Right under that is your Event Aggregator Status. Can you take a screenshot of what you see there?

Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[John Ridneour]

Thanks Jaime,

I’ve never dealt with SQL before so I’m not really where to put that code, or how to execute it. If you could walk me through that, that would be great.

I’ve enabled the full debug log and it seems to be empty?

Attached is a screenshot of the event log and the system status.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi John,

I’m not seeing any screenshots attached, would you mind re-attaching?

In addition, can you provide me with the URL that you are trying to import, so that I can do some testing on my end?

Let me know if you have other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

 

[John Ridneour]

Sorry about that, the file must have been too large. Here’s the screenshot.

And this is one of the calendars I’m trying to import

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi John,

Thanks for providing me with that information.

I was able to successfully create and schedule an import with that URL on my test site.

In that case, let’s try to rule out if there is some type of conflict at play.
This is usually because of:

• A conflict with another plugin
• A conflict with your WordPress theme
• A template customization for the Events Calendar that requires updating

When it comes to that type of issue, it is preferable to troubleshoot in a staging environment if you have one.

A first quick test is to simply temporarily revert back to a default WordPress theme such as twenty-sixteen to see if the issue persists.

The next step would be to go through our testing for conflicts procedure and let us know what you find out.

Basically the goal here is to revert back to a bare WordPress installation to see if the problem persists. It also allows us to pinpoint what the cause of the issue is.

But, before you do that, there are 2 things I would advise:

• Make a backup of your database
• Consider activating a “Maintenance Page” plugin if you are doing this on your live site (to minimize impact on your visitors)

Let me know how that goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[John Ridneour]

I’ve got back to twenty-sixteen and disabled all plugins except Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro, as well as cleared the cache, and the issue still persists.

[Barry]

Interesting … thank you for your patience so far.

When I look at our record of imports (linked with your Event Aggregator key) on our server, I see that we’re trying to push event data back to your site – example in my next reply of event data sent back 40 mins ago, at time of writing – so whatever is going wrong, it’s going wrong locally.

Would you be happy and willing to share a database dump for us to look at? The Duplicator plugin provides one means of getting this information.

Note that if the database dump is particularly large, you may need to share it via a Google Drive or Dropbox link, or similar.

[Barry]

This reply is private.

[Barry]

…One other thing to try here, John:

add_filter( 'tribe_aggregator_queue_class', function() {
    return 'Tribe__Events__Aggregator__Record__Queue';
} );

This could be added either to a custom plugin (preferred) or else to your theme’s functions.php file. If you give it a go (just temporarily, for a day or more) does that alleviate the problems at all?

[John Ridneour]

Ok, I tried the code you sent in a custom plugin, and that seemed to do it. Is this a permanent fix or is it just indicative of something else I need to resolve?

[Barry]

So, to give some background information, we previously processed imports using WordPress’s scheduled tasks functionality (‘WP Cron’) – which is a system that aims to allow plugins like ours – and indeed WordPress itself – to perform background work.

However, there were limitations to this approach and it didn’t work well in some WordPress installations/hosting environments. For those reasons, we changed our default strategy to use asynchronous requests (again, WordPress provides the underlying mechanics).

Unfortunately, we’re starting to see that this may also have issues in various environments.

Is this a permanent fix or is it just indicative of something else I need to resolve?

The code I shared forces the use of scheduled tasks instead of async requests.

It is not intended as a permanent fix, but I’m glad it works for you – it will hopefully act as an effective short to medium term solution.

Longer term, I’m less sure. At this stage we still need to collect more data from a wider sample of users before figuring out next steps. I will however associate this conversation with the relevant bug report on our internal tracker, so we can update you and/or reach out with any further questions.

Thanks for your patience!

[Victor]

Hi John!

Just wanted to share with you that a new release of our plugins is out, where we included new Import Process System setting that allows you to select whether you want your imports to be processed Asynchronously or using the cron-based system. You can find this setting under Events > Settings > Imports tab under the Global Import Settings section.

If you were experiencing problems with your imports, please try using the cron-based system.

Also, if you were using the code snippet to use the cron-based imports system, please remove it and use this setting instead.

Additionally, we added an option to stop and clear all current asynchronous import processes by using the Stop current processes option.

You can find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-for-the-week-of-9-september-2018/

We apologize for the delay and appreciate your patience while we worked on this.

As always, we suggest to setup a dev/staging site so you can make all plugin updates without disrupting the live site.

Please update the plugins and let us know if the fix works for your site.

Best,
Victor

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