iCal Export of All Events – Outlook works, Google doesn't

[Tom]

Greetings:

I’ll start with my goal: To have a visitor/Member use a single button to capture ALL club events into the calendar of their choice – predominately Outlook and Google.

I recently dropped a button on the homepage for our Club where visitors/Members could grab all events for the year and drop them en mass to their calendar via iCal. While the Outlook users found that they got a new calendar within their Outlook environment with all events properly present, the Google users were responding with all sorts of issues (records not on the right dates, etc.).
Can be found at http://www.HBYC.org – left column, mid-way down page, green button and text.

While the visitor/Member can go to each event and individually add that event to Google, that doesn’t accomplish my goal of a one-stop approach for all users. Pluse, I can’t seem to find or figure out if I should have a separate button on the homepage for Google… and if/how to build such a thing if it is the correct approach.

I checked Forums, Knowledgebase, Blogs, etc… but can’t find anything obvious.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

PS – Love your plugins, and have recently switched from WPEC to EventBrite for tickets and find the integration and conversion was super!!

Tom C.

[Barry]

Hi Tom,

I’m sorry to hear you’ve hit up against a few difficulties.

I think that – unfortunately – you are hitting up against a known bug relating to organizer names specifically. Some of your organizers have names that contain symbols which are being encoded incorrectly, through no fault of your own.

Until we can deliver a fix (which we hope to do as quickly as possible in a future release) I can really only recommend sticking to organizer names containing no symbols such as dashes or ampersands and/or if you feel comfortable doing so you could make the change outlined by Brian in this topic.

Does that help?

[Tom]

Barry,

Good to hear from you again.

Thanks for the very prompt reply… and for the clues regarding special characters used in Organizer names. I’ll take a look and see if I can clear that up so the visitors/Members can all use the same button to get all events.

I tried to follow the link you provided in your reply, but it looks like that post has since been marked “private”, so there really wasn’t anything there for me to read.

I’ll check through my Organizer names and make modifications – and I’ll know pretty quickly if that solves everything. If so, I’ll close the thread promptly. If not, I’ll let you know what happens.

Thanks Barry,

[Tom]

Barry,

Forgot to ask in my prior reply – what are the special characters that are offending, and is it limited to “Organizer”? For instance, I have square brackets [], the “at” symbol @, and other standard forms of punctuation in titles and other fields (e.g. colon, backslashes, dashes, commas, apostrophe, etc.).

Before I start changing symbols and playing trial-and-error, any guidance you can provide would be great.

In a twist that is helping us troubleshoot, we have a Google calendar (we’ll call it “M”) that was sync’d with another Google calendar (we’ll call it “T”) that has Outlook iCal upload as its source. “M” was the destination for the Google iCal upload for All events that prompted my ticket. While every record appears to have come over to Google “M” through the iCal upload attempt, some appeared to get date-spans far in excess of the original event, most appeared to have truncated the titles, and most couldn’t be opened from Google calendar on mobile devices to compare content in the records… and therefore can’t delete them. We’re about to log in to Google “M” through the web interface to see what we can see.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks, – Tom C.

[Barry]

I do apologize, Tom – let me quote from the reply here. This does involve modifications to core plugin code which, typically, we wouldn’t recommend – but equally the option is there if you’re comfortable with it:

There is a proposed fix that may help.

In this file around line 272:

\the-events-calendar\lib\tribe-ical.class.php

// Current code:
$item[] = sprintf( 'ORGANIZER;CN=%s:MAILTO:%s', $organizer_name, $organizer_email );
 
// Should be revised to:
$item[] = sprintf( 'ORGANIZER;CN=%s:MAILTO:%s', esc_url( $organizer_name ), $organizer_email );

Let me know if you have any follow up questions.

[Tom]

Barry,

Thanks for the code snippet, but I don’t know that particular escape code well enough to predict what it will do, and that seems pretty extreme (stripping out blank spaces, converting ampersands to #038, etc.). So I’m not likely to use that as a first method to address the issue.

We just completed the “fix” on the iPhone. Though the Google calendar via the web showed only good records, the iPhone showed all of these bad records but wouldn’t let us delete them – any attempt to open them caused calendar to crash.

We deleted the Google calendar from the iPhone to clear out all of the bad records from the prior attempt along with the good records (by doing so, it was like clearing cache on the iPhone). When we then turned the Google calendar back on, all of the valid events were re-posted from Google… without any of the offending records.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier replies, I’m curious as to which character is causing the problem, and if I can be sure it is limited to the “Organizer” field. I have the ‘at’ symbol @, square brackets [], as well as dashes in the Title, and event descriptions… so I just want to be sure before I make another attempt to grab the iCal import.

Tom C.

[Barry]

Hi Tom,

I missed your previous question re special characters (as we both posted at approximately the same time. Although I don’t have an exhaustive list I can provide you with the key characters in question are these ones:

& ampersand
< left angle bracket
> right angle bracket
" double quote
' single quote
— dash

Accented characters may also be relevant here.

Thanks for the code snippet, but I don’t know that particular escape code well enough to predict what it will do, and that seems pretty extreme (stripping out blank spaces, converting ampersands to #038, etc.). So I’m not likely to use that as a first method to address the issue.

Absolutely. It was an option shared in a previous support topic and I’m only copying it here as an option for you to explore if you wish to do so 🙂

[Barry]

Hi!

It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this topic.

• Need help with anything else? Go right ahead and post a new topic, one of the team will be only too happy to help
• Still need help with this issue and need to re-open it? Again, please simply create a new topic and link to this one to provide the team with some context

Thanks!

[Leah]

Hello,

Thank you again for bringing this issue to our attention. We’re happy to say that we have added a fix for this into our upcoming version 3.11 release. Keep an eye on your Updates page for the new version. If you have any trouble with the update (or are still seeing this problem after you update) please start a new thread and we’d be happy to help out.

Thank you for your patience while we got this release ready to go!

Best,
Leah
and the rest of The Events Calendar team

[Author]

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