Scheduled Imports are not running

[Nico]

Hi,

Thanks for the patience here! A new maintenance release + 2 hotfixes for Events Aggregator were released last week. More information in the release notes and hotfix notes.

We have been doing extensive tests on the scheduled imports issue, but we cannot reproduce the issue unfortunately which makes it difficult to work on a fix for it. Using the database dump of one of our customer we could pint-point a side issue which fix can help with the issue (this patch was released in the hotfix). If you are still still experiencing difficulties with Scheduled Imports, the next step would be to have a database dump of the site with the issues so we can inspect it and try to find the culprit (be sure to mark the reply as private if you send the dump).

To re-test this on your site, follow these steps:
– Update The Events Calendar to the latest version 4.5.12.2.
– Delete one of the scheduled imports.
– Re-create the scheduled import and monitor the results in the History tab.

Truly hope this helps, but if not we will firmly continue to help 🙂

Best,
Nico

[Oliver]

Hi Nico,

thanks for your update.
We are currently testing the import with the new version. When this is finished I will update this ticket.

Can you meanwhile please answer my question (this is already the third time that I’m asking …):

And can you please give me an answer what the three error messages mean / in what circumstances they are thrown? That would be really helpful:

1. Import failed.
2. Import failed. The import fetched is not queued up for importing. Please try the import again.
3. Import failed. Import data records have to be finalized, before posts (events) can be inserted.

Best regards,
Oliver

[Courtney]

Hi Oliver

1. Import Failed – a timeout from the source feed, a broken queue, a timeout from EA Server, throttling from EA Server, throttling from FB all fall into this basket; sometimes things just fail
2. before the upcoming release we were using imports in the wrong order and could happen to use imports that had been requested more than 4hrs before the import actually starts; when a client request an import to EA Service the service will provide a unique Import ID that will be valid for 4 hours; after that time the Import ID is not valid anymore and message 2 and 3 (2 if at the start of an import,
3 .if in the middle) will be returned; we have addressed that issue in our very soon to be released update

I hope this helps. I checked in with our lead Event Aggregator developer regarding these messages. You can expect that update to happen this week, perhaps within a day of this message. We’ve been hard at work cleaning up all the bugs in EA and are committed to making this experience exactly what our customers want.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Oliver]

Hi Courtney,

the imports are getting better, but we still have some issues.

Currently about 60% of the imports are successful, but for the others we still get the error “Import failed. The import fetched is not queued up for importing. Please try the import again.”

Here are some examples of URLs where we get the error:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/jazzandmilkfiesta/events/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/291231361041640/events/
https://www.facebook.com/pg/JazzclubRegensburg/events/
https://www.facebook.com/hafenhalle/events/

I just saw that you released a new version of the plugin today.
Will it fix these errors?

Best regards,
Oliver

[Courtney]

Hey Oliver

Yesterday’s update did resolve similar issues. Can you update The Events Calendar and let me know if this clears any of that up?

Thanks again for working through this with us.

Just a heads up, I am due to head out on maternity leave any day now. If we don’t get this wrapped up, another team member will be filling in for me to see this through.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Oliver]

Hi Courtney,

I installed the latest version. Our imports are scheduled weekly for Sunday evening 20:00. We will see then if it works better.

Apart from that I realized some strange behavior:
In the import history it says for all imports done: “23 hours ago”.
Today is Thursday, so therefore this doesn’t make sense all.

Is this another bug?

Best regards,
Oliver

[Oliver]

PS: here is the screenshot

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Oliver.

[Courtney]

Hey Oliver

I wanted to pop in to let you know first, I’m so sorry we are still in the same spot. Second, I’m about to head out for maternity leave. I am passing this on to my team lead, Barry, for now. We are committed to resolving this issue, and hard at work on sorting it all out. I want to be sure you get the attention you need on this in my absence.

Thank you for working with us on this. We highly value your willingness to continue with us.

Courtney ??

[Oliver]

Hi,

unfortunately I got no answer on my question above:

Apart from that I realized some strange behavior:
In the import history it says for all imports done: “23 hours ago”.
Today is Thursday, so therefore this doesn’t make sense all.

This issue still exists as you can see in the screenshot.
Today is Thursday and it says it was running 2hours ago, but it’s still scheduled weekly on Sundays. That doesn’t make sense …

Apart from that we get for all failed import the message shown in the screenshot. What does this error message mean? What’s wrong and how can we solve it?

Regards,
Oliver

[Barry]

Apologies for the delay, Oliver.

WordPress provides a facility for running scheduled events (you can think of these as ‘background tasks’ that run every 30 minutes or some other interval of time).

These are important to the smooth operation of Event Aggregator but, in some cases, the basic implementation provided by WordPress is not ideal.

• We may have a scheduled task that we ask WordPress to run every 30 minutes
• By default, WordPress relies on visits to the site to trigger these tasks (otherwise nothing happens)
• In a site without enough traffic (or where the volumes of traffic are uneven) this is not guaranteed to happen

However, WordPress is a flexible piece of software and it is possible to configure ‘real’ cron jobs to manage this and ensure that scheduled events do fire on demand.

Exactly how to configure this varies by hosting environment, but most popular shared hosts will have knowledgebase articles explaining how to configure this and here are some other helpful articles on the same subject:

• Properly setting up WordPress Cron
• Replacing WordPress Cron with Real Cron

Now, it may be that you already have this in place – but I did want to flag it in case you didn’t as this is a not uncommon source of the sort of problems you have described.

Let me know if that helps at all!

[Oliver]

Hi Barry,

thanks for the answer.

We have a lot of visits on the website (several thousands every month), therefore I think the issue is not related to the WordPress cron. But the documentation is helpful, thanks!

Nevertheless meanwhile the import works much better (90% are successful). I guess one of the latest plugin updates solved it. Therefore I close this ticket.

Best regards,
Oliver

[Barry]

That’s great to hear, I really appreciate you confirming this 🙂

If we can help with anything else, please do create a fresh topic and one of the team will assist as quickly as they can.

Thanks!

[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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