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There's a lot of events happening all the time on my university campus, and, together with a few other students, we thought it would be nice to provide the event schedule as a calendar. So organisers register their event on the intranet, and it gets added to an icalendar file which people on the campus can subscribe to.

This works great when people load the calendar url on their iPhones, but it doesn't when loading in Google Calendar. We have noticed two problems:

  1. When you subscribe to the calendar and then log out and back in, events are no longer visible. Sometimes, clicking refresh fixes it. The vents do not disappear from android devices associated with your account.
  2. When an event is removed from the icalendar file (eg. if it's cancelled), it still remains on the android devices that sync with any google account that subscribed to the calendar. New events sync fine, though, so it's not that the sync didn't happen.

Do you know how I can solve these two problems? I've noticed the STATUS:CANCELLED property in VEVENTs, but it doesn't seem to work when the calendar method is PUBLISH.

Thanks!

PS: If you can suggest a way to test changes faster that waiting for Google to pull the changes from the server, it would be great; right now, I have to wait about 6 hours between each test...

Clément
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2 Answers2

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my understanding is that removing it from the file is not the way to cancel an event. One must ensure that there is a UNIQUE identifier to match any changes. Also must follow the spec for cancelling/changing an event.

See How to cancel an calendar event using ics files?

If all of that is correct, then the various applications that 'subscribe' to a calendar should in theory update the event status when they read the updated file. Unfortunately the speed and frequency of that is up to that application. (NB: note also difference between subscribe and "import")

Yes I have noticed that google is slow to update sometimes. Only thing I can think of is use another application where you have control perhaps over the subscription update frequency to test if the way that you are cancelling an event is working. Once you see the cancellations happening there, then resume testing on google (I have noticed Google is more pedantic than some apps, so you may still have to work to get it 100% working on google.)

Hope that helps!

Community
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anmari
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I've tried the suggestions but Google Calendar only ever adds another event. The iCalendar validators say that the files I generate are valid, and iCal on the Mac removes an event if it has cancel information. But neither Google Calendar or Outlook do. Rather frustrating.

Matthew Setter
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