When running an iCal import ALL categories are imported

[Seth Hemken]

So I’m having this issue now where we import menu items for food items from 4 different categories at our district school level to our individual school calendars. At the district office level event calendar we have all those menu items inputed specifically to the categories they pertain too. Then at the school level we do the ical import and in the URL feed we point it at the category specific url.

example: http://www.reddingschools.net/events/category/nutrition-breakfast/ical

however when the importer comes back with the list of items that are going to be imported, it’s a LOT of other categories included. Originally I thought this was because of nested categories, which would make sense and actually works great, however these other calendar items are absolutely not included in the nutrition-breakfast category NOR is the nutrition-breakfast category a parent category for any other category.

Needless to say it’s a problem. Would like some advice on this.

Thanks,
Seth

[George]

Hey Seth,

I apologize for both my delayed response here, and for my lack of understanding about your issue. Can you clarify what you mean, for example, by this quote:

we import menu items for food items from 4 different categories at our district school level to our individual school calendars

I’m just not clear on the relationship of your different school sites and then the district site, etc.

Do you have The Events Calendar on every single individual school site, and then on your district site, you are running scheduled imports from each of these sites?

If so, then we can narrow down the problem to be the generation of the iCal feeds themselves.

Let me know what you think about my questions here, and again, I’m really sorry about the delayed response! We aim for response times within 24 hours, and I just dropped the ball here – I took your thread in a morning where we had tons of other threads coming in, and then I had some unexpected outage time yesterday for most of the day.

Real sorry about that Seth – I won’t be delayed again and am eager to help you get things working again 🙂

Cheers!
George

[Seth Hemken]

Hi George,

So we are running a “Multi-Site” implementation of WordPress with the multi-site licensing event calendar pro, so each school site has their own implementation of the event calendar pro. For our nutrition menu calendar we look at the District site as the “master” calendar to pull from, then at the school site levels we run the ical importer function to pull from 4 specific categories at the district level. Those categories are populated by our nutrition department at the district level. This creates basically a hub and spoke way to get the nutrition calendars automatically to the school site calendars without having to import the csv file to each school site individually. Our nutrition team imports the menu’s via CSV import to the district level, then all other school sites are ical importing those categories and events automatically to their own calendars.

When we first got it running about a month ago all seemed to work fine, the ical import is setup for 1 daily import for the respective category that is at the district level. The ical importer points to the district page.com/events/category/nutrition-breakfast/ical or district page.com/events/category/nutrition-lunch/ical to pull the lunch and breakfast information and dump it to the school calendar’s in the same categories. It started out working fine pulling just the events that are in those particular categories. But about a week ago we started noticing that the import was pulling all event items from the district level including importing other event items, categories and placing those events and categories automatically at the school level.

It seems like it’s all somehow linked to the ical importer, I ended up trying to recreate those ical imports but it still exhibited the same behavior, copying many many unwanted events and categories from the district site.

[George]

Thank you so much for the elaboration here, it definitely paints a clearer picture of things and should help us better help you 🙂

For starters, can you share your “System Information” with us as described here? → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

That will be a good place to start, from which I can then try reproducing your issues and see what I can learn here.

Thank you!
George

[Seth Hemken]

This reply is private.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by Seth Hemken.

[George]

Thanks for this @Robert! I notice right away that you’re using version 3.11 of the iCal Importer – we’re now at version 3.12, can you try update to that and see if it makes any difference with your issues?

Thank you!

[Seth Hemken]

Looks like there’s not an automated path to update in the plugin screen to 3.12? I just went in and checked again and it’s not reporting any updates for iCal importer. Is it just a download and install over top ?

[George]

Hey Robert,

Hm, I’m sorry you’re not seeing the update notice! That’s odd because I checked your license on this site and it is still active, so you should have the update notice in your wp-admin…

In the meantime, yes, you can also just manually do the install by downloading the 3.12 plugin files here at http://theeventscalendar.com/my-account/downloads

Be sure to delete the preexisting version on your site, not just deactivate it, before installing the 3.12 files. This deletion will not delete any event data from your site 🙂

I hope that helps!

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

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