Events calendar Outlook ical fails due to Invalid TZID value

[Anthony Whalen]

Hey,

I am having issues importing the ical file from the export events option in events calendar pro.

I ran the exported ical file through https://icalendar.org/validator.html and got this error: Invalid TZID value (America/New_York)

I did some digging, and found that the timezone needs to be declared, or something for it to work. For example, I added this above the BEGIN:VEVENT and it solved my issue:

BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID;X-RICAL-TZSOURCE=TZINFO:America/New_York
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20171105T020000
RDATE:20171105T020000
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20180311T020000
RDATE:20180311T020000
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
END:DAYLIGHT
END:VTIMEZONE

Without this added, when I try to import the calendar to outlook, it just fails with either no error, or a document conversion error.

Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks!

[Cliff]

Hi, Anthony. This is a known issue — Outlook doesn’t support the same time zone format that everyone else does.

We have it on our eventual to-do list to incorporate https://github.com/sabre-io/vobject (or possibly another solution once we begin work on this). This thread should receive an update if/when this functionality is released.

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

[Anthony Whalen]

Hey Cliff,

Thanks for the reply.

Do you have any idea what kind of time frame we are looking at for such a fix?

Thanks

[Cliff]

Not anytime soon… It’s been logged for a long time, and supporting nonstandard template tags within iCalendar files isn’t high on the priority list.

However, if TZID;X-RICAL-TZSOURCE=TZINFO:America/New_York worked for you — since that time zone string is standard — you could use the tribe_ical_properties filter to accomplish this customization: https://github.com/moderntribe/the-events-calendar/blob/4.6.18/src/Tribe/iCal.php#L445

Please reference https://theeventscalendar.com/tips-working-wordpress-actions-filters/ if you are not sure how to get started with WordPress action and/or filter hooks.

[Anthony Whalen]

Hey Cliff,

That was my next question!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

[Cliff]

You bet. If you get a working solution, this might be something we could piggy-back on and fix it in a more reasonable way than implementing Outlook’s own custom time zone codes.

Looking forward to hearing back from you!

[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

[Jennifer]

Hello,

Just wanted to let you know that a new maintenance release is out, including a fix for this issue with exporting events to Outlook.

Find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/announcing-the-events-calendar-4-9-4-and-events-calendar-pro-4-7-4/

Please try updating and let us know if you are experiencing any further issues. As always, we recommend running updates on your staging site before doing so on your live site, just to be on the safe side.

[Author]

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