Office 365 Duplicate Events Followup

[Chris]

Hey there!

My team and I here have been endlessly pulling out our hair to figure out the duplicate events thing when coming from an Office 365 calendar. It’s been crazy. I do know that Office 365 doesn’t create persistant UIDs which causes some big problems.

The purpose of this thread is to ask a couple questions and possibly make some suggestions.

When I import an Office 365 calendar into Google or my Mac’s iCalendar, neither my Google Calendar or iCalendar ever cause duplicate events on the .ics feed refresh. I know you’re not Google or Apple, so you don’t have access to their code; somehow though, they’re able to circumvent an Office 365 feed from causing duplicates upon import.

How exactly? Beats me.

Maybe there’s a temporary fix that can be instituted though. What would the possibility be of every time before running the import, it removed previous events brought in from that same feed?

It’s not pretty, and may require changing the DB structure slightly to record which events are associated with a feed (side note: that would be helpful for managing the events in the DB also when required), but perhaps that could circumvent the issue.

Judging by the number of posts in the forum about duplicate events, it seems that this is an issue affecting a lot of people, and may be worth considering. All of our schools use Outlook 365, and we have the MS license for TEC; however, as it’s turning out, it’s not really doing us much good at this point.

[Andras]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for reaching out with your question!

I understand how frustrating this issue can be. This is a tough one indeed.

Like you pointed out, the source feed provides a different UID (Unique and persistent IDentifier) each time for the same event; the standard is that the UID is what you can rely on to distinguish and track events across time and changes.

There is unfortunately little we can do when the source feed does not comply with a standard (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.4.7);

I checked if it would be possible to purge the events of the same feed from the database. It looks like this would be possible, but I have to point out this will consume more resources, especially if you have a large number of events.

In the database all imported events have a line in the wp_postmeta table with the meta_id = '_tribe_aggregator_source'containing the source feed as meta_value.

So I guess the post IDs can be collected with running a search on that. Then remove all entries from wp_posts and wp_postmeta with those IDs. Then run the import.

Does this help? Let me know.

Cheers,
Andras

[Chris]

Thanks for the information. Is it possible to add this in a future release as a conditional checkbox on the imports?

[Andras]

Happy to help, Chris.

It might be possible to add it later. If that is something you would like as a feature I encourage you to visit our User Voice Page and either upvote an existing request or make a new request there.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

Andras

[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

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