Google Calendar not Importing properly

[gloriadei]

Hello! For my site, gloria-dei.com we are not seeing the google calendar update for events. The history and daily imports report that the updates and new events are being added and imported. But on the public calendar, I’m not seeing these updates.

Please advise.

[Barry]

Hi Gloriadei,

Thanks for contacting us and I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been experiencing difficulties.

Can you share – by private reply if you prefer – the URL of the Google Calendar you are importing from and give me some specific examples of events that exist there but are not being imported to the calendar on your own website?

Can you also confirm if they appear in admin events list (ie the list you can reach via the WordPress dashboard) or if they are missing there, too?

Thanks!

[gloriadei]

This reply is private.

[Barry]

Hi!

Does the aggregator only add events? Not modify or delete changes to existing events?

It can certainly allow for events to be modified – but, no, it won’t automatically delete them. The reason for this is that in a lot of cases, the fact that an event is no longer included in an iCal feed (which is the way Google Calendar shares data) can be temporary and doesn’t mean it has in fact been removed.

So, for the time being, the best way forward is to manually delete those events.

Does that help/clarify things?

[gloriadei]

This reply is private.

[Barry]

I understand what you’re asking for however there’s no fix in the works, as such, because this is the expected and deliberate behaviour.

Google Calendar provides us with data in what is known as the iCal format. That format, unfortunately, doesn’t provide a way to clearly communicate that events are deleted, vs events being outside the current range of the feed.

As simplified example, let’s say we have events taking place on the following dates:

• Jan 10
• Feb 23
• Mar 15
• Jun 12
• Jul 29
• Aug 23

A lot of iCal feeds will only contain the upcoming events, so today (at the end of April) that would look like this (basically, all past events are removed from the feed):

• Jun 12
• Jul 29
• Aug 23

That doesn’t however mean that the first three events were deleted, as such. Another factor is that iCal feeds often have a limit in terms of how many events they contain. Let’s say for arguments sake that the limit is 3 (even if in practice it may be 10, 50, 100 … depending on what software is used to generate the iCal data) so, on today’s date, we only see the final set of 3 events.

If a new event is added in June, it would push out the final event on Aug 23 (due to the limit on the number of events contained in the feed):

• Jun 12
• Jun 19 [new event]
• Jul 29

Yet, that doesn’t actually mean the event on Aug 23 was deleted. It’s still in the source calendar, just not included in the feed.

That is a fairly simple example of the challenges involved with what you are asking for (at least, when our source data is an iCal feed). There is an existing feature request for this, however, and I would encourage you to add your vote:

tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/17696905-event-aggregator-to-remove-deleted-events-during-i

I’m sorry we can’t do more on this occasion.

[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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