modifying one recurring event only creates hundreds of copies

[Robin]

I have a recurring dinner event. The idea is that when the menu is ready to post, we can edit that week and add the menu, understanding that it’s editing just the one event and taking it out of the recurrence.

I am able to delete single instances of a recurring event, no problem. However, if I edit one event and select the option to edit just that one, the server spins and eventually errors out. On my dev site, I find that it’s created nearly a thousand copies of the event on that day before the process died. On my localhost, it only made 8.

The error I get reads:
Fatal error: Maximum function nesting level of ‘100’ reached, aborting! in C:\xxx\xxx\xxx\wp-includes\wp-db.php on line 880

Full error “call stack” log at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/894876/recurring-edit.txt

I’ve reproduced the error with the 2011 theme and only TEC activated. Have cleaned out extra entries on the dev site and don’t want to attempt there again because we’re about to lock it down for launch, but obviously want to be able to resolve this. For now what I have been able to do is to copy the content of the event, delete the one recurrence, and create a new event from scratch, but that’s not something I want to ask my client to do.

TIA for your help!

ETA: If I modify a recurring event and set it to apply to all events, it seems to be OK. Just if I’m pulling it from the recurrence, I guess.

[Rob]

Hey Robin! Thanks for this. This one is a real doozy; I just spent a few minutes trying a wide range of recurrence patterns/edits, all of which ended with me following your steps – breaking one out with a different description, to mimic the dinner scenario you’ve faced…and never was the experience anything other than what’s intended.

I talked over the specifics of that error message with the developers, and usually that happens when something gets stuck in a recursion loop; e.g., hook something into save_post, and save a post in the callback, which in turn calls save_post, etc.

We can test if this is an infinite loop issue, though. Just increase the value of xdebug.max_nesting_level in your php.ini, and set it to something like 200. It should solve it; and if it doesn’t, we’ll know this is indeed an infinite loop problem and can try to advise from there.

Thanks for your patience so far. I’ll watch for your reply and will try to troubleshoot as needed then.

[Robin]

Bummer! I wish you could replicate it because it’s happening on both my local install and my dev site (the client site has been launched so I could work on this there, or let you, if you wanted to at this point).

I upped the nesting level on the localhost and got the error again. Upping it did give it time to make more copies of the event (thankfully on the localhost it wasn’t 600 to start with). Here’s the error results file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/894876/20130820_tribe.txt

Would love to get this sorted. We are kind of afraid of using the recurring events at this point. 🙁

[Rob]

I can see how you would be worried about the recurrence front, yes. Do you want to send me over a set of creds (privately) for the dev site, and I can try to recreate this situation? Please understand that we can’t be responsible for anything that occurs during this time (so you’ll want to back up beforehand), but problems beyond the obvious duplication issue shouldn’t occur here…as that’s really all I’m going to be doing in there.

Let me know if that works and I’ll jump into testing it from there. Thanks again for your patience on this so far.

[Robin]

This reply is private.

[Suzanne Huebsch]

I have a similar problem where modifying one recurring event generates one new non-recurring event and leaves the recurring one I was editing as is. Should I start a new thread with all my details?

[Rob]

Hey there Robin. Thanks for your patience here; I was finally able to take a look at this for you today. I was able to break an event out of the “Healing Service” recurrence (category: “Healing Service”) without issue. When I narrowed it down to view the “Church” category, I did indeed seen the duplicates – sometimes pages full – of your events. And when I went into an existing event and attempted to change it I encountered your exact problem, complete with this message: http://d.pr/i/OkVL. I’m sort of stumped as to what could be causing this unless there’s something on the hosting side we’re not accounting for.

Just to confirm: this isn’t related to the problem with the recurrence dialogue in 3.6, is it? Where the options become grayed out like so: http://d.pr/i/Tfak. If you’ve not added the patch to your functions.php for that, let me know (since we may find it addresses this problem too).

WCKG: that does sound like a known bug we’ve got in the system at the moment but might not be related to Robin’s core problem. Have you checked to see if it’s described here (https://theeventscalendar.com/bug-hunting/)? If it isn’t please do open a new thread and we’ll get you sorted best we can. Thanks for your patience here.

[Robin]

Rob, thanks for coming back to this.

In my theme I have added the patch for the grayed out screen, but I switched the dev site to twenty eleven with no modifications, which is why the patch isn’t working there. Even with that patch, though, it’s bugging out on me.

I suppose it could be hosting related, but I do encounter the same issue on my localhost install–I don’t know beans about hosting but I would assume the two environments are rather different? I was guessing the connection lost message was due to the loop that WP was tying itself up in.

If there are other steps I should take to help troubleshoot this, please let me know. I’m rooting for you to find it. Thanks!

[Rob]

You are definitely correct that if it’s happening locally, it wouldn’t be a hosting-side issue. I am indeed a bit stumped here but let me see if I can rope one of our more technical team members into this to see what they can offer. Thanks for being patient – if you’d be so kind as to leave the dev creds active for a bit, we’d greatly appreciate it!

[Rob]

Hey again Robin! So I had our developer Jessica get a fresh set of eyes on this, and she was able to identify the source of our problem very quickly (thanks in large part due to the backtrace you’d added to Dropbox…thanks!).

The culprit looks to be a bug related to the “Sticky in Calendar View” checkbox. It appears you have checked that on all of the Early Worship events, and when you break the event out to be it’s own event, having that box checked causes our code to save the event as sticky at the same time that it’s saving it as a standalone event, which causes an infinite loop. To verify we tried unchecking that box and then saving an event on its own, and it didn’t cause any trouble.

I’ve got this logged in the system now; while it’s too late to fit into the impending release we’re shipping over the next week, it’ll likely make the following build from there (though I cannot guarantee anything). We realize this is a big priority and I see indeed another thread on the same problem; so you should know it’ll be prioritized accordingly on our end. Until then it might be worth holding off on using the sticky functionality if possible though.

Thanks again for all your feedback and patience so far. If you have other questions I can answer here, let me know.

[Robin]

Rob, thank you so much for letting me know what’s going on–and please tell Jessica thank you for finding the issue! This is something we can work around for now but I do hope that you are able to get it sorted for a future release.

(In this client’s case, it’s a church, so there are about 5000 events, more or less, every Sunday, but for the month view, they need the worship services to appear on the grid no matter what.)

Thanks again!

[Rob]

Hey again Robin. Thanks for confirming; I totally understand your position and this is a big one for us. I can’t promise anything but I’d be shocked if it didn’t make it into the subsequent maintenance build after this one is out the door.

Let me know if you need anything else here. Going to close the thread for now though 🙂

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