Duplicated Ical events

[Dan]

Hello, We are having trouble with ical events being duplicated. Facebook events work fine, but icals duplicate every time the import is scheduled to run.

The feeds are being pulled in from http://www.ci.gilroy.ca.us/iCalendar.aspx and https://www.morgan-hill.ca.gov/iCalendar.aspx.

Is there any way to pull in these types of events without having them duplicated?

Thanks,

[Victor]

Hello Dan!

Thanks for reaching out to us!

Unfortunately, this is an issue we are already aware of. Like you say, it’s only happening with iCalendar imports like yours.

I will change this thread’s status to “Pending fix” and link it to the bug report. This way we’ll let you know when a bugfix is released in one of our future maintenance releases.

I apologise for the inconvenience and we’d appreciate your patience while we work on a fix.

Best,
Victor

[Cliff]

Hi, Dan.

The issue here is that your iCal file does not adhere to the Unique Identifier (UID) property from the iCalendar specification.

Here are the logistics of the issue:

• Let’s say you have “Event A” in the .ics file that your iCal URL downloads.
• The first time I download the .ics file, “Event A” might have the UID of 54822a76.
• Then, if I immediately re-download the .ics file a second time, “Event A” no longer has that same 54822a76 UID. Instead, it has a completely different one.
• Because Event Aggregator stores each imported event’s UID (specifically for the purpose of detecting event updates and avoiding duplicate events), it does not (and cannot) know that the 2nd dowload of “Event A” is the same “Event A” from the 1st download of this iCal URL.

This issue isn’t common, but we do see it from time-to-time. It’s usually an issue with iCal feeds from custom software, but it’s not an issue with major calendar providers like Google Calendar.

Therefore, the only resolution for this would be to discuss the situation with the source/author of that iCal URL and ask them to follow the iCalendar spec, specifically for the UID property.

Please let Victor know if you have any follow-up questions on this topic.

[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

[Author]

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