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Options -> Import iCal Events -> Import iCal File

Does anyone know where I can find details of the format supported by this functionality?

dkjorgi wrote:Options -> Import iCal Events -> Import iCal File

Does anyone know where I can find details of the format supported by this functionality?

You can find the spec and some more details about iCal at this Wikipedia link. Right now the church calendar supports importing iCal files from Outlook and Google Calendar. For a future release we are testing the import of iCal files from the legacy church calendar.

I've been trying to import some ical files from Google today and they keep failing with the message:

We encountered an error with your ICS file. You may need to create a new ICS file, or try again later.

This has been happening even if I trim down the ical file to a single event.

Is this a known problem?

This sure seems like a bug. I checked the Wiki and followed the information. I have tried a Google and Outlook 2007 calendar ical file to import for our stake calendar. Just as silid, I scaled down to 1 item. The tool won't import a file created from the calendar -- the one used for one-way sync.

This could save me a ton of time if it were working. As it is, I am spending a little over an hour for each month entering items on the calendar. The repeating function seems better than the old calendar, but I still have to double check because sometimes the dates float due to conflicts.

Here is sample file that I am trying to import. What am I doing wrong?

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20101201T152728Z
DTSTART:20110101
SUMMARY:News Year's Day
UID:629958A
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

mzundel wrote:Here is sample file that I am trying to import. What am I doing wrong?

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20101201T152728Z
DTSTART:20110101
SUMMARY:News Year's Day
UID:629958A
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

I don't know that you're doing anything wrong. But this issue does sound reminiscent of a problem reported with the LUWS calendar, as described here. For that issue, the absence of a DTEND element was a problem. Just for troubleshooting, you might try manually adding a DTEND and see if it makes a difference.

kyleq wrote:You can find the spec and some more details about iCal at this Wikipedia link. Right now the church calendar supports importing iCal files from Outlook and Google Calendar. For a future release we are testing the import of iCal files from the legacy church calendar.

No matter what I've tried, even a new google test calendar with a single event, I can't get my google calendar import to work. Has anyone?

If you've made it work, detail it!

mzundel wrote:Here is sample file that I am trying to import. What am I doing wrong?

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20101201T152728Z
DTSTART:20110101
SUMMARY:News Year's Day
UID:629958A
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Well, I did some experimenting, and found that your test file imports just fine -- after I make one change. I changed the DTSTART value to have a time; instead of simply 20110101 I made it 20110101T070000Z. (My previous suggestion about adding a DTEND turns out to be irrelevant.)

Of course, that doesn't sound like an appropriate limitation for all-day events. But perhaps it gives you a means to do some manual editing (hopefully with an editor that does smart search&replace using regular expressions) so that you can fix up your iCal file before you import it.

I think the issue with that particular event as Alan_Brown noted is with the DTSTART field. According to the spec that field needs to either have a date & time or if it's just the date it should be formatted like:
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20101020

Did that event come from google or outlook? I've had success importing from both, didn't have to do anything special (other than fiddling with outlook to get the events that I wanted exported correctly).

As for the old calendar events, there's a couple of problems with the ical file it creates, so I don't know if it will ever work with the new ical import. There is the calendar setup wizard that was added in the last month or so that should allow you to convert all the old calendar events (that doesn't rely on the ical export from the old calendar). I think you have to be a stake or ward admin to have access to it, but I'm not sure exactly how the privileges work on that.

mstauff wrote:I think the issue with that particular event as Alan_Brown noted is with the DTSTART field. According to the spec that field needs to either have a date & time or if it's just the date it should be formatted like:
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20101020

Thanks for the tip. Indeed, that format does make the import work correctly.