Import via Google Calendar creating duplicates

[Justin Tate]

I have lowered the scheduled import to once a week because every new import adds the same event to my calendar. Oddly it’s mostly duplicating national holidays, though others are doing it as well. Help please.

[Andras]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

Can you share with me the following:

• the url to the feed you are trying to import and is giving you trouble
• couple specific events that are being duplicated

I would like to run some tests.

Do I understand correctly that it is only some events and not all of them which are being duplicated?

Cheers,
Andras

[Justin Tate]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for sharing that!

I  see that you are using an Outlook365 feed.

Every event usually has a unique identifier (UID) which is constant throughout the life of the event. That makes it identifiable as the same event at any point in time.

Unfortunately O365 doesn’t always respect that. That is why you are getting duplicates of the national holidays. With every load of the feed you will see that “Valentine’s Day” for example has a different UID.

I checked some of your other events, they seem to have the same ID between downloads. The question is, do they duplicate when you change something in the source calendar? Or do they also duplicate when you don’t change them?

Andras

[Justin Tate]

How do I check to see if there is a UID?

I removed all the holidays as a temporary solution, but as you said I am running tests to see if the other events are duplicating when a change is made on the source calendar.

I’m trying to see if there is something we are doing that might be causing it. I don’t think there is though. We have changed the time or description of a couple events and they seem to have duplicated instead of updated.

[Andras]

You can download the .ics file and open it in a text editor. Then you will see a bunch of this.

There is usually a UID for every event, and they should remain the same every time you download the .ics file from the same URL.

With holidays you will likely see a different UID with every download.

A.

[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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