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Unable to Sync to Google

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 7:50 am
by mclay
I am attempting to sync my church calendar to Google for the first time. I have followed the directions listed under the Sync settings and pasted the URL into Google (Add by URL). Google attempts to load the calendar, then errors out with the following message, "Settings Error: We could not parse the calendar at the URL requested.". I have generated a new URL and get the same error.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 8:39 am
by aebrown
mclay wrote:I am attempting to sync my church calendar to Google for the first time. I have followed the directions listed under the Sync settings and pasted the URL into Google (Add by URL). Google attempts to load the calendar, then errors out with the following message, "Settings Error: We could not parse the calendar at the URL requested.". I have generated a new URL and get the same error.

Chances are that there is something in the iCal feed for your calendar that is not quite right. You could pass the URL to an iCal validator such as the one at http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net -- that might tell you where the problem is. Then you could report the specific problem, or if it is a special character or something in a particular event, you might be able to work around the problem by changing that character.

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 9:10 am
by jglanfield
I had the same problem at first, but it seems to be working now (and the cloudapp.net page reports no errors). However... the calendar doesn't send along any time-zone settings, so all of the imported events (into Google) are all off. And yes, I've already activated a resource and selected a time-zone, etc.

Any thoughts?

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 9:37 am
by aebrown
jglanfield wrote:I had the same problem at first, but it seems to be working now (and the cloudapp.net page reports no errors). However... the calendar doesn't send along any time-zone settings, so all of the imported events (into Google) are all off. And yes, I've already activated a resource and selected a time-zone, etc.

Yes, that is a bug affecting us all, which has been reported multiple times. See this post for links to the various threads.

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 9:39 am
by jglanfield
aebrown wrote:Yes, that is a bug affecting us all, which has been reported multiple times. See this post for links to the various threads.

Oh, whoops. Sorry!

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:41 pm
by mclay
aebrown wrote:Chances are that there is something in the iCal feed for your calendar that is not quite right. You could pass the URL to an iCal validator such as the one at http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net -- that might tell you where the problem is. Then you could report the specific problem, or if it is a special character or something in a particular event, you might be able to work around the problem by changing that character.

Hum... that didn't seem to help much. Here's what I got from the iCal parser:

[INDENT]The validator couldn't parse your input. Things to check:

Was the URL correct?
Was it really in iCalendar format? Sometimes, for example, an URL that you think points to an iCalendar feed really points to a web page that in turn points to the feed.
Does it load into another calendar program, such as Google Calendar, Hotmail Calendar, Outlook, etc? If not then there's almost certainly something badly wrong.

If your feed fails in other calendar programs too, here's how to narrow down the problem:

Capture a copy of the feed in a file.
Try removing things and validating each reduced version as a snippet. Eventually you'll get to a minimal version that works. Then try adding things back to see what breaks.

Back to the iCalendar Validator

Message: expecting "COLON", found ' ' [/INDENT]

It looks like it may be missing a colon, but it doesn't tell me where. I looked for any standard tags (i.e. DESCRIPTION, LOCATION, DTSTAMP, DTSTART, BEGIN, END, SUMMARY) that may be missing a colon, but don't see any.

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:43 pm
by jglanfield
Did you generate a new key before doing that test? You may want to post the URL (minus the key) that you copied into that web page. It worked fine for me, but I generated a new key first.

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:53 pm
by mclay
I generated a new URL. I don't see anything in the instructions about a "key" unless you're referring to the alpha-numeric string at the end of the URL. Here's the latest URL I generated that Google is still rejecting:

<snip>

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2011 11:24 am
by mfmohlma
mclay wrote:...Here's the latest URL...

So, mclay did post a valid link. I accidentally clicked on it and my Outlook opened and imported the calendar. I didn't snoop around too much, but definitely saw ward meetings. Unfortunately, I was a little too stunned to try in in Google.
mclay wrote:Message: expecting "COLON", found ' '
My guess would be something data-dependent that prematurely ended a data field like this. :) Interesting that the iCal validator would not tell you where the error was.

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2011 11:59 am
by aebrown
mfmohlma wrote:My guess would be something data-dependent that prematurely ended a data field.

Good guess. mclay, take a look at your 10-11 Dec 2011 event for High Council Speaking Assignment. It seems to be a two-day all-day event (do your high councilors really speak that long? ;)), but I think the biggest problem is that it has an HTML table in the description that also includes some strange characters. If you fix that event, your sync should start working -- that's the only event that seems to be problematic.

And yes, I looked at your data so I could help you by finding the problem, but I have discarded all traces of the data.