Changing imported "blank" venue adds second venue to event

[Matt Thibodeaux]

For over a year we have been using WP All Import plugin to import events from a partner website’s feed but are now experiencing an issue with the venue field for some of the imported events. We have the “_EventVenueID” field for venue IDs mapped from the partner site to corresponding venue IDs created in the Events Calendar. So imported venues with mapped IDs get set properly in the Events Calendar events.

Sometimes there are new venues from the partner website that get imported as a “blank” setting for events because we don’t have a map for the new ID yet. Before we were able to edit the event’s venue and change it to the new venue created in the Events Calendar.

The issue we are having now is the “blank” venue is not getting updated/replaced with the new venue set. Instead the new venue set is added as a second venue below the blank one after updating the event. Please see the attached screenshot for what is happening. This causes the venue to not display on the frontend as the “blank” venue is used first.

We tried changing the venue for a couple events that had the “blank” venue and they all add the new venue as a second field. We think this is an issue with the Events Calendar as the import is working the same way as before.

Can anyone help us figure why this is happening?

Running WordPress Version 4.9.2, the Events Calendar Version 4.6.9, Events Calendar Pro Version 4.4.21, and WP Import All Version 4.5.0. Unfortunately we are not able to run the usual troubleshoot procedure of deactivating all other plugins or switching to Twenty Seventeen theme as this is a live website that we cannot be down for troubleshooting.

Thanks in advance.

[Andras]

Hello Matt,

Thanks for reaching out to us with your question!

My hunch is the following.

When you are importing the venues the ID (post_id in the database table) is already taken by some other post (event, venue, draft, autosave etc.), so the venue will not get the same post_id as on the source side, but will get the first available, in one word, a different one.

When you import the event, the venue ID associated with it will still remain the same as the system doesn’t know it has been changed. So the ‘venue ID’ that is associated with an event could be anything else, another event or a page or whatever.

This is unfortunately something that is difficult to handle with external import / export tools and is beyond our support.

Depending on what your source is Event Aggregator might be able to help you with this task. There the imported events, organizers and venues will get properly matched.

I hope this gives a bit of a clarification. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Cheers,
Andras

 

[Matt Thibodeaux]

Thank you for your reply. The existing post_id makes sense. We found that we had to delete the imported events with the blank venue, map the venue ID#, then rerun the import again.

I suspected this issue would have been beyond the support but I thought I’d ask anyways.

We looked into the Events Aggregator but unfortunately the source feed from our partner website is not in a supported format.

Thanks for your help.

[Andras]

You’re welcome Matt, happy to be of service.

Is there anything else I can assist you with before I close this ticket?

Cheers,
Andras

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

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