We will be onboarding a campus unit this summer that has been using Timely for their event calendar for over a decade. We plan to import the existing events on their Timely calendar to LiveWhale via a Linked Calendar using an iCal subscription feed from Timely, then we’ll delete the linked calendar and keep the events. Will the iCal feed automatically pull every single past event ever posted to the Timely calendar for 10+ years? Or is there some sort of default limit, e.g. the feed only pulls events from the past X years? We want to pull all upcoming events and likely some past events too, just not sure we need 10+ years’ worth. If there is a default limit, or a choice we can make, I want to explain it correctly to the unit. Thanks!
Great question!
From the sample livewhale/client/private.config.php:
//$_LW->REGISTERED_MODULES['events']['custom']['since_linked_calendars']=93312000; // max age of items (in seconds) acknowledged in linked calendars (default: 93312000 i.e. 3 years)
//$_LW->REGISTERED_MODULES['events']['custom']['until_linked_calendars']=31536000; // max future date of items (in seconds) acknowledged in linked calendars (default: 31536000 i.e. 1 year)
So, by default, LiveWhale will include events from -3 years to +1 year from now when importing and syncing Linked Calendar. You can uncomment those lines to tweak that, though, so if you have a special case where you know you’ll be importing a feed that has ~10 year old events in it, it’s configurable. Hope this helps!
Thanks, Karl. If that is the default setting for all LW clients it might be helpful to note that in the documentation for Linked Calendars, which is where I looked first for an answer!
Hi Jen,
Great point! Our docs are a living document and ongoing project and we’ll definitely get this piece added to help clarify.
Thanks!
Rachael
On a semi-related note, if you delete an event from a linked calendar feed, will it reappear the next time the feed syncs? I know you can hide events on a feed and that status does not change, but wasn’t sure about deletions.
Hi Jen,
Yep! LiveWhale will re-“discover” a deleted event the next time it syncs (this can be a useful way if you want to intentionally undo customizations that have been done to a synced event), so if there’s an event from a Linked Calendar you just really don’t want to display, leaving it as status=Hidden is the way to go.
Thanks, Karl! That’s what I figured.
Follow up question on this topic. We will be onboarding one of our schools this spring, along with all of its departments and centers, and combined they have about 22,000 events in their current calendar system (Trumba) dating back to Feb 1999 (!!!). They have asked what the “practical limit” is for bringing over past events, as some of their departments want to preserve as much past data as possible simply for internal archival purposes. I don’t want to even attempt importing that many events via iCal feed or CSV upload as I imagine it might overwhelm the system and cause other problems. I believe they will be open to whatever time limit we give them, as long as there is some other way they can preserve the archival data, e.g. if I tell them they can only import X years of past events and then archive the rest some other way, like in a CSV file or something. What would you suggest is a reasonable solution there? Has anyone ever tried importing a huge number of past events and if so how did it go?
Hi Jen,
We’ve definitely had projects that involve bulk importing of a great many past events, but anything over a few thousand you definitely get into something we’d want to handle as a custom project and not just dropping it into the UI or as a Linked Calendar. (We do have a new CSV importing tool coming in 3.0 that runs asynchronously and can handle some more bulk-ier bulk imports. But speaking to the 2.x case for now…)
Generally we try to go by business needs and saying “How likely is anyone to browse event data going back more than a couple years?” and cut off things at that point. Hope this might help, happy to chat more about it,
Karl