Complex Recurring Events: Confusing….

[Courtney]

Hello,

I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around what’s going on with our recurring events. We are trying to set up a calendar that show’s various artist’s gallery or event times. This means that there’s lots of recurring events.

I read here — https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/pro-recurring-events/– that there are some limitations to how they can work. But here’s some weird things I see going on:

I have an event that happens every day but Sundays from 9-5. (It’s actually noon-4 on Saturdays, but I’m simplifying for now.) So I did the custom recurrance with a start and end date. Now there are a gazillion instances of the event in the Events list on the admin site.

On the public view, there’s now an event instance on every single day on the calendar view — and it shows up three times, I think because the calendar is broken up into three sections. Is that right? If so, why and can we adjust that? I just want whatever events are happening that day, not multiple instances of one event if it goes for most of the day.

On the list view, I see the event on every day now, too. I guess I get why this is… but I wonder if this is the best solution for something that happens every day over a long period of time. What do you recommend?

Also, in this case, where I want Saturdays to be a different time than the other days — would you recommend that we manually edit the “single” versions of all of the Saturdays to get around this?

[Barry]

Hi Courtney,

Recurring events can sometimes cause a little confusion but hopefully we can help you through these issues 🙂

On the public view, there’s now an event instance on every single day on the calendar view — and it shows up three times, I think because the calendar is broken up into three sections. Is that right? If so, why and can we adjust that?

So to take an example from your site, you have an event set to begin on April 6 and end on June 29 (a total of 84 days). This is set to recur every day except Sundays and so you end up with:

• The first event on April 6 – which will be listed on each of the next 84 days, too
• The second event on April 7 – which will be listed along with the previous event and, similarly, on each of the next 84 days
• The third event on April 8 – alongside two events from the first two patterns…
• …process repeats…

The reason you don’t see more than 3 in any given day within month view is probably just because it’s been limited to show no more than 3 events per individual day (this is a configurable setting) – but in reality, many individual days will have huge numbers of events with this sort of pattern in place.

So essentially the way it works is it sees you have set up an event lasting 84 days and that you want to “duplicate” it according to the recurrence pattern you configured. I’m guessing what you need to do to get the results you expect is simply set the original event, on April 6 in this example, so that it also ends on April 6.

Does that make more sense? Again, we realize it’s a little confusing, and if you can think of any ideas that might help avoid confusion in future releases we are open to your feedback.

Does that help with at least the first aspect of your recurrence issues?

[Courtney]

Hi, Barry.

I think maybe the solution in this situation is that we don’t have the event listed 84 times. Instead, we just have an “opening day” event and a “closing day” event. It doesn’t totally solve the problem of alerting people to the fact that there’s an on-going event. But I think it’s better than having a bunch of on-going events clutter up the calendar in a confusing way. I am thinking of also just having an “on-going events” page that we manually update. Maybe there’s a future feature in here for you somewhere — maybe a link to currently on-going events that you don’t want listed in the calendar every day. Not sure.

Question about the setting for # of events per day — you’re talking about the “Month view events per day” setting. It’s currently set to 3. But the way it was working was that, for the event that was set to be 9am to 5pm, it was showing up 3 times per day. Why would it do that?

Thanks!

[Barry]

Maybe there’s a future feature in here for you somewhere — maybe a link to currently on-going events that you don’t want listed in the calendar every day. Not sure.

We’re always on the look out for new ideas, and if you do have an “ah hah!” moment where you think of a solution that you feel would work well not only for you but others we’d love to hear it and have a UserVoice page for just this sort of thing 🙂

This is particularly awesome because others can then comment on and up-vote the idea, which helps to both flesh it out and give us a sense of how much demand there might be.

But the way it was working was that, for the event that was set to be 9am to 5pm, it was showing up 3 times per day. Why would it do that?

So this is what I was trying to explain: with an event that runs for 84 days it will display (within month view) on every one of those days – but just once for each day.

If you then make it recur daily (I appreciate there was an exception where it skipped a day, but let’s keep things simple for ease of explanation) then you will have a further 84 events that also display within the month view calendar, and this second set begins on the second day of the first event.

The same applies to the 3rd, 4th … 84th sets. Therefore, while the details are identical, they are distinct entities – but the effect is they stack up – this is why the first day of that sequence showed just one event, the second day showed two events, the third three (and if it wasn’t for the setting limiting the number of events to display per day, you’d have seen the complete pattern stacking up to 84 events at one point).

The answer in this case is either to have a single event spanning 84 days which does not recur, or, a single event spanning just one day (or part of a day) that does recur – for 84 days.

The way you were modelling things, which was a completely understandable mistake, was to have an event that both spans 84 days and recurs for 84 days, too.

Does that help/clarify things at all?

[Courtney]

Hi, Barry.

I think we’re still a little confused. We have updated events that occurred over a long time to just have an opening and closing event day, so that those are on the calendar. And we may set up another page to list out on-going events. But we do have some events that need to be on the calendar that occur multiple times.

Check out how we’ve got this one set up: https://nimbus.everhelper.me/client/notes/share/198473/6uDl3GNPItLSamD5hdkstcdZ9bNBcxnb/

It’s recurring weekly on Thu, Fri, and Sat. However, if you look at the calendar view, it shows up three times a day, every day. http://www.twobettysclean.com/community-calendar/2015-05/ We’re not getting why that is happening and what we need to do to resolve it. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[Barry]

So that’s a great example.

You’ve set the event to begin on April 23 and end on May 16. Let’s pretend for a moment that it is not a recurring event: it is 23 days in duration and so will show on every day of month view between April 23 and May 16.

Now, if you set this to recur annually, you’d have another event stretching out for 23 days beginning on April 23, 2016.

In this case however it is set to recur every week on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays – and so each week you will have another 3 events (beginning Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and each will be 23 days in duration.

What you need to do here is change the duration so it is for just one day (ie, starts on April 23 and ends on April 23) but keep the same recurrence pattern.

Does that help?

[Courtney]

Ah, I get it. Thanks!

[Barry]

Awesome!

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