Tickets for Recurrent Event show the Wrong Date

[STEPHEN]

Hello,

We have a number of recurring events on our website:
http://highlightcity.com/

Today we upgraded from WooCommerce: Event Tickets to Event Tickets PLUS, so that we could include QR Codes on our tickets.
However, now during our Buy Tickets / Event Ticket testing… we noticed that for recurring events the ticket is not showing the correct date ( for the Event they chose ) — but rather it shows the ORIGINAL, 1st Date, ( way, way in the past ) of the 1st ever event.

For example, this event:
http://www.highlightcity.com/event/cupcakethursdays/2016-02-25/

When you purchase the ticket — the ticket that you receive via Email — instead of showing the date of the event you clicked on… it shows the 1st ever, original occurrence of that recurring event.

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/qv3fwl7

How do we fix this?

[Brook]

Howdy Stephen,

I would love to help you with this.

The bad news is: Event Tickets Plus doesn’t fully support Recurring events, nor did WooTickets before it. That’s why when you add a ticket for a recurring event you get that little popup telling you it’s not supported. Unless your site was somehow heavily modified to add this feature, even the old WooTickets should have had the exact same issue you described. Basically when someone purchases a ticket whether in Woo or Event Tickets Plus they are purchasing a ticket for all occurrences/dates, not a single one. This works great for courses and the like, but not good for theaters, concerts, and such.

The good news is: We are working to add support for this. It is looking likely to be released in version 4.2 of our plugin.

Does that all make sense? Does that answer your question? Please let me know.

Cheers!

– Brook

[STEPHEN]

Hi Brook,

Thank you for the enlightening answer. The only problem is, well, this is a really big problem for us. The entire commerce and “value” of our site is our ability to showcase, promote, and sell tickets to events. MANY of these events are recurring in nature. But, if people purchase tickets from us, then show up at the door for an event, and present a ticket for something dated 1 year back… well, you can imagine the problems that ensue.

However, I understand your answer and am glad to hear that an update is on the horizon. In the mean-time, surely there must be a way that I can edit the Ticket Generation Template PHP code directly by hand ( in our Child Theme ) in such a way as to ensure that it shows the correct date?

I’m a developer with many, many years experience customizing WP PHP/HTML/CSS. SO if you can just point me in the right direction to get started editing the Single Event Query that generates a Ticket and the Ticket that gets emailed to our clients… then I’m sure I can apply a fix myself.

Thank You!

[Brook]

Howdy Stephen,

Thanks for your understanding, I am very sad that this is not working as expected.

I looked into this a while back while creating a snippet. Let me first give you some background on how Event Tickets Plus / WooTickets works.

When you add a Ticket to an event that ticket is actually a regular product in WooCommerce, albeit hidden from most views. When you add a ticket to a recurring event the same thing happens, a single product is added to the WooCommerce store, making it available for purchase.

When a potential customer views any event in a recurring series they will see the same product for sale each time, the same ticket. When they hit “Add to Cart” that product is added to their cart. It doesn’t matter if they  were viewing the January occurrence or the February one, the same product ends up in their cart with no other identifying info.

It is well after the above “add to cart” phase that the emails get sent out. When that happens the only real record of what was purchased is the Woo Product ID. From that product ID we can extrapolate the event series, but not the event itself ( using the function tribe_events_get_ticket_event() ).

So you would have to add some identifying information and carry it through past the checkout screen. The easiest way might be storing that data as a session variable. Perhaps hook into one of the WooCommerce add to cart actions, and then check $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] to see what date was used for adding the product to the cart? In our upcoming solution we will probably end up adding a unique product for each occurrence. This will allow you to manage the stock for each event separately, make it easy to use our checkin tool, etc. But if all you want is to have the recurring event date printed alongside the ticket info then it can be much simpler. Add that identifying info however you think is easiest, then print it out somewhere in the following email template: /event-tickets/src/views/tickets/email.php which can be overriden by following our Themer’s Guide.

Does that paint a pretty clear picture? Do you think you have what you need to take a whack at customizing this?

Cheers!

– Brook

[STEPHEN]

Brook,

OK, Thank you, and yes, got it.

1. Add an extra WooCommerce metadata field that tracks exactly which event date they bought the ticket for.
2. On the event ticket — replace the “Event Date” with that metadata

With recurring events — does QR Code / On-Site Checkin process still work as expected?
Does view/print attendee list work, or if I understand your logic as explained,
that would generate a list of all people who purchased a ticket to any “recurrance” of this event ( ever )?

I’m pretty sure this will be the last piece of this thread.
But that’s the last answer I need — how to handle on-site check-in for tickets to recurring events.

I can already see that at this point there’s a very good argument to be made for changing the nature of these events from Recurring to simply Cloning the event every week and creating a new, single event.

Thanks for the insight.

[Brook]

That’s a good plan.

With recurring events — does QR Code / On-Site Checkin process still work as expected?

It should work okay. You’ll have to manually check if their ticket is for that date, or another, as the system will check them in regardless. But, other than that…

Does view/print attendee list work, or if I understand your logic as explained,
that would generate a list of all people who purchased a ticket to any “recurrance” of this event ( ever )?

It will print, export, and view for all event dates, not just a single occurrence. It also will not show your extra meta data. However, if you were to go all out in your implementation and save that meta data somewhere, in theory it should be fairly easy to add the data to all of the above functions. The table which lists that data is mostly a standard WP_List_Table. Adding the extra column to it will cause it to view on the  checkin, print, and export pages. However there is one caveat, I cant think of a way to modify the table outside of directly editing the file which powers it: /the-events-calendar/vendor/tickets/src/Tribe/Attendees_Table.php

Hopefully that info helps. We’re really excited to launch this feature properly as soon as we can, that way no one will need hacky workarounds like I’ve described above. 🙂

Please let me know if you have anymore questions. Cheers!

– Brook

[Support Droid]

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