Best practice forum (Archived)

F2F Calendar Issues

Hello

I found two possibly linked calendar issues when creating Face to Face sessions.

Firstly, if the details of the session (date / time etc) change once students have signed up for it, they do not seem to receive a new notification of the changes.

Secondly, is that i am positive that in the past when creating a session and signing up for it, the session would then automatically appear in my (Google) Calendar. That does not now seem to be happening, but was a great feature.

I do receive the ical attachment, but have issues with them failing to import when i try to do it manually.

Can anyone offer any suggestions or assistance?

Thanks

Scott

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Hi Scott

We have the same issue. We looked at commissioning some custom code around this and it turns out to be quite complex: if you meaningfully change the time/date/venue you can't assume those who originally booked can make/get to the new session.

We got stuck on how to handle this - particuluarly as many of our F2F sessions are fully subscribed:

Do you unbook them, and let them choose from available alternatives.
Do you unbook them, and give some preference for those displaced before you allow others to book for the newly created session(s).
Do you move them to the new session but advise them of the change and of how to unbook and of alternatives available.

Currently, we use the first option and its awful, manually intensive and often we have go in after the event and tidy up the course page.

Cheers

Austen

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Hi Scott,

On the second issue, there were changes to the structure of iCals in 2.2.14 and 2.2,15, is this when you started getting problems importing them to your Google calendar? It would be good to know if your iCal problems are a result of those changes, or if you are still on an older version.

If you are on 2.2.15 upwards, could you forward me a couple of the ical attachments to ciaran.irvine@totaralms.com. I can have a look and see if I can discover why Google does not like them any more.

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Just a note that Scott is currently running 2.2.11 and has also encountered the 1-hour DST offset issue with iCals - both issues are resolved across 2.2.14 and 2.2.15.

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A further note - the iCals being generated as of 2.2.16.1 contain some extra newlines at the the beginning and end of the file, and this causes the iCals to fail to import on Google Calendar.

We'll get a fix for this ready for the next 2.2 release.

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