Repeating events from Google Calendar causing glitch with Linked Calendars feature

[nlewis (Nancy Lewis)]

We used an ICAL url for a linked calendar. Noticed that for repeated events from the Google Calendar, some of the resulting listed events will be displayed on incorrect dates on the LiveWhale Calendar.

I refreshed the Edit a linked calendar page a couple of times including re-adding the ICAL url.

That didn’t work entirely so we manually added some dates one by one on the Google Calendar. While the events (added one by one) are displaying correctly on the LiveWhale Calendar, old recurring events (i.e. events from 2022) are now being pulled into LiveWhale. For now, I’ve hidden the reoccurring events.

Is this a weird glitch when importing calendars with repeated events?
(This issue is happening in the Governance Group within our Santa Clara University event calendar).

Is there a proper way to ensure repeating events from a Google Calendar is displayed correctly when importing into a LiveWhale Calendar?

Thanks so much for your help.
–Nancy

[karl (Karl Hinze)]

Hi Nancy,

Hmm sorry to hear this is giving you trouble. We’ve got a fair amount of experience over the years handling the RRULE’s for iCal exports, including those from Google Calendar, so something else must be going on here.

Could you maybe provide steps to reproduce for one event (i.e., if it repeats [weekly] from [date1] to [date2] in google calendar, it’s coming in as [date3] in LiveWhale) and we can work on reproducing it on one of our servers? If that’s not possible, maybe sharing a full link to the Google ICAL file so we can try it out (with a notice of a wrong event to look out for) would be the next best thing.

Thanks!

[nlewis (Nancy Lewis)]

Hi Karl,

Thanks for the extra tip in troubleshooting.

Here’s an example where I replicated the issue: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_ac67efe9b757b4e63c676ff0b7a78e5679bc770a8d54b5eaf54e9eaf4ee6c9ca%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

The “Recurring Event Test” event has a start date of Wed Sept 11, 2024 and an end date of Friday December 13, 2024 with the setting of “Monthly on the second Wednesday.”

It should have only 4 recurring events according to the google calendar.
Wed Sept 11, 2024
Wed Oct 9, 2024
Wed Nov 13, 2024
Wed Dec 11, 2024

However, when this google calendar is loading into LiveWhale, the events appear on the following dates instead:
Mon Sept 9, 2024
Wed Sept 11, 2024 - only correct date
Mon Oct 14, 2024
Mon Nov 11, 2024
Mon Dec 9, 2024

Here’s the Google iCAL link with the original issue if you need an extra testing example:

“https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/scu.edu_ghd75168emjouv0nkr1b9l946c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics”

It is used with the “Governance meeting” tag.

I re-added the above linked calendar to a test group calendar in LiveWhale Calendar.
I’m seeing that UCC Meeting (Winter 2022) is appearing on October 14, 2024 under my Your Events tab even though it shouldn’t.

In the google calendar, I see that the repeated event"UCC Meeting (Winter 2022)" was only intended to be be repeated on Jan 11, 2022, Feb 8, 2022, and March 8, 2022. Looks like the primary event had a setting of Monthly on the second Tuesday, 3 times

Let me know if you would like me to do anything else.

Thanks for the help.

Best,
Nancy