Duplicate Events ical Import

[Sara]

Hi guys,

I see that this isn’t anything new but I have been reading through other posts and can’t seem to find something that will work for me.

I have a recurring (every 30 minutes) iCal import from another website. Every time it imports, it duplicates events.

I have “the-events-calendar-importer-ical.4.0.3.zip” installed.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Cliff]

Hi Sara.

That’s the latest version of our iCal Importer add-on.

Could you please provide me the URL of the iCal file you’re importing?

Also, please provide some links or screenshots to duplicate events so I can inspect them.

Thanks.

[Sara]

This reply is private.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 2 months ago by Sara.

[Cliff]

Hi Sara. I downloaded that .ics file, imported a single event, and it only imported one copy of it.

One of several things could be going on:

• You have that URL setup as a recurring import and something about the URL’s events get modified to where the iCal Importer is reading each event as a new event (i.e. something in the .ics file is different and is making it look like a brand new event to import). This is something that would require monitoring the URL for changes and not a one-time import test.
• Or you have a theme or plugin conflict that’s causing it to have this issue, in which case, please follow our Testing for Conflicts Guide and see if that helps narrow down the cause of this.

As far as the iCal Importer goes, there’s a meta field added to all posts. You can check out the _uid post_meta field in this screenshot: http://cl.ly/0i2o382N123F

To find all Events posts added via import, check out this code snippet that I created for you:

https:// gist. github.com /cliffordp/71a343dd9956b1303dee#file-events_imported_by_ical_importer-php (without spaces in the URL)

Let met know how things go!

Thanks.

[Cliff]

We looked further into the URL you provided and the UID of each event in that feed changes with every single request/refresh. As such, the iCal Importer isn’t going to know these are duplicate events and should be ignored upon the subsequent import.

The best resolution is to fix the issue at the source — to have that calendar feed not use new UIDs upon each refresh.

If that’s just not possible, you might be able to do something custom. If you need assistance with a custom solution, please reference our list of known customizers.

I hope this helps!

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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