Sync of deleted event status

[Jacob]

Hello,

I have read in another post that ical files do not provide sufficient information regarding deleted events. Is there any other import method you offer that makes it possible to recognize if an earlier imported event does not exist any more and thus gets deleted in the events calendar?

Best wishes,
Jacob

[Brook]

Howdy Jacob,

I would love to help you with this.

We do not offer such an import method. There really is not a great event format I know of that even offers that capability.

One workaround that might works for some would be to delete any event imported from a given feed if it’s not present in the iCal file. This has a huge caveat, if the iCal file is incomplete then all of the missing events would get deleted. The could happen if the iCal file was split into two parts, or only shows upcoming events. Then the other half of events would get deleted.

Are you in a position where you would like to delete any event that’s simply not present in the iCal feed?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Jacob]

Dear Brook,

I think our ical file is just always complete, I would love to get the code for this one.

Best,
Jacob

[Brook]

Howdy Jacob,

I would truly love to give you some quality code that does this, but it is not quite possible with our current API. I was inquiring about your needs mostly to see if the one thing that actually is possible for us to build would fit your needs. If more folks have similar needs it would help us know what to build next.

If you are a skilled programmer and are willing to fork or modify our current plugin, this could be possible. I would checkout Tribe__Events__Importer__Importer::saveEvents(). This function already checks if an event is set. If I were to modify it I would note each event ID that gets inserted or updated by this function, then afterwords I would run a query that deletes each post where the meta_key ‘_EventIcalSource’ matches those events, but is not in the list of IDs you created. This should do what you want. But from what I am seeing there is no action or filter in here that would allow this, so you will have to fork the plugin. 🙁

Even if you are not a programmer though you should vote on this feature request I just added.

Please let me know if you have any followup questions. Cheers!

– Brook

[Jacob]

Hello Brook,

Okay, thanks a ton! I am not a skilled programmer, so for now I will manually delete events in both google calendar and TEC. However, I have voted for the feature. Thanks!

Actually, the only reason we are still using google calendar and importing the ical to TEC instead of using TEC as the original source is just that the event creation in google calendar is so easy with just clicking somewhere into the frontend calendar view and the event is created. Our colleagues are not so you that they can browse in WordPress backend.

Do you have an easy to use frontend solution for that?

Best,
Jacob

[Brook]

Howdy Jacob,

I love the Google Calendar interface too. We do have Community Events which does provide an interface on the front end, although it is a bit different from Google Calendar. Does that maybe do what you want?

If not, please suggest this as a feature on UserVoice (feature suggestion page for The Events Calendar).  We love that sort of feedback, always looking to make the calendar easier to use.

Cheers!

– Brook

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