Does iCal Import Organizers?

[Teri Inman]

I’m not sure because my ICS file does not contain an ORGANIZER element. It does have organizer information embedded in the DESCRIPTION element so I’m curious to know if there’s a hook somewhere I can use to add my own organizer details. Thanks!

[George]

Hey @Teri,

Thanks for reaching out!

The iCal Importer currently does attempt to grab organizers and venues. The results depend on how a specific ICS file or feed has its component events listed.

For example: Sometimes events in the ICS format have a “MAILTO:” option, and if this is the case then iCal Importer attempts to use this to assign imported events to an “Organizer” with that email address.

Support for venues is a bit better, as the ICS format has a whole “LOCATION:” option—if an address is found for this field, it is used for making a venue….

However, I use the word “attempt” in my first sentence above because based on the ICS files or feeds being imported, results may vary. And when it comes to extracting Organizer info from event descriptions, this is currently wholly unsupported. 🙁

Support for importing organizers and venues is much more robust in the built-in (and free!) CSV importer found in The Events Calendar. You can read about using this importer here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/using-the-events-calendars-csv-importer/

Let me know what you think about all of this info and about what further questions you might have.

Thanks!
George

[Teri Inman]

Thank you George. I understand that nothing is supported if I try to extract details from my event description. Was curious if there is a hook I can take advantage of and write my own function to extract the details and add them to the event? Trying to leave the core TEC alone!

[George]

Hey Teri,

Thanks for your follow-up.

• Are you only interested in hooks/filters of the iCal Importer add-on itself?

• Or if there are filters for the CSV importing baked into The Events Calendar, would be interested in these as well? So that, in other words, you can modify the CSV importing to pull organizer data from your event descriptions?

The reason I ask is because, unfortunately, if you are interested only in tinkering with the import processes of iCal Importer, there are few options. 🙁 There are no filters that can be used to modify the importing of organizers—you would have to open this file within the iCal Importer plugin files directly:

the-events-calendar-importer-ical/src/Tribe/Feed_Parser.php

And then find this method, which is around line 605 or so of the file:

convert_vcal_event_to_importable_event()

☝️ Then you would have to modify the core code here in this function directly—not via filters or hooks.

---

The CSV Importer, meanwhile, has many hooks and filters for extensibility. There are three importers: one for Venues, one for Organizers, and one for Events. So if you were trying to extract Organizers from events, you could manipulate your file and use hooks and filters to look for data specific to that file and run imports.

It’s a tricky and involved customization to make regardless of the options here, but it is much simpler to do from the CSV Importer.

I hope this information is useful!

Cheers,
George

[Teri Inman]

Thanks George. I had come to the same conclusions and glad I wasn’t missing anything. I don’t have a need to use the CSV importer for organizers as we’re using TEC and add-ons to sync with our master calendar system and hope to have administration of TEC be largely hands-off in terms of manually importing, adjusting events, organizers, etc. So, I’ll weigh my options and move forward accordingly. Thank you.

[George]

Sounds good, Teri—thanks for reaching out here. I will close this thread for now, but open a new thread any time if other questions or issues ever arise.

In the meantime, best of luck with your project!

— George

[Author]

Posts