Duplicate Venues upon import from Facebook / how to dump all venues?

[efromdc]

1. When I import an event from facebook, the venues get duplicated whether the venue is already in the database or not. Not sure why. Ive spent a better part of the week going through the code and database and have no clue why its happening. Is there a way to add a unique condition to the database so that the venues stay singular if the data to be entered is PRECISELY the same as a previous entry?

Relatedly,

2) If I empty all venues from the database, what effect will it have on all previously existing events? Will all events function as normal but just seem not to have venues associated with them?

Thanks

[Barry]

Hi efromdc,

I’m sorry you’re hitting difficulties.

1. When I import an event from facebook, the venues get duplicated whether the venue is already in the database or not. Not sure why. Ive spent a better part of the week going through the code and database and have no clue why its happening. Is there a way to add a unique condition to the database so that the venues stay singular if the data to be entered is PRECISELY the same as a previous entry?

This can happen if the venues are not truly the same venue within Facebook – it’s actually quite possible to have multiple different “venue objects”, each with their own unique ID, that happen to share the very same address.

We don’t really have a reliable means of differentiating between them as it is the unique ID that we use as the basis of testing if they have already been imported (or not).

Might that be possible here? If you have any doubt that this is the cause and want to explore it further we’d be happy to do so, but can you provide some concrete examples of the events/venues of interest (perhaps by dropping the relevant Facebook URLs in here)?

If this is the problem and you have no way of resolving directly on Facebook it would still potentially be possible to workaround it with some custom coding: the tribe_fb_parse_facebook_event hook could be used to run your own tests to detect if a venue with the same address is pre-existing and let you re-use it – so that could be worth exploring, though we’d need to leave such a modification in your hands.

Beyond that we would certainly be interested in taking this forward as a feature request if you’d like to post one: this will also let others show their support/comment further and give us a good sense of how much demand might exist for such a feature.

2) If I empty all venues from the database, what effect will it have on all previously existing events? Will all events function as normal but just seem not to have venues associated with them?

Yes.  The events should remain the same, albeit they will no longer be attached to a venue.

I hope that helps!

[Barry]

Hi! It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. If we can help with anything else, though, please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed. Thanks!

[Author]

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