Import calendar feature - once off or does it update?

🍱 Features & apps 📆 Calendar
1

I’ve got a hopefully easy question -

I have a 2 nextcloud calendars: work and personal.

I also have to keep a Google calendar for work I do with others.

If I use the import function on Nextcloud calendars, it imports a vcs/ics file.

When I import the cal file with, e.g. 10 appointments, I presume it will not update it when it now has 15?

Thanks.

2

Afaik, a subscribed external read-only calendar resource is not updated instantly but by a background cron job as described here. I have in mind that the resource will be updated not more than once a week after it has successfully been loaded.

3

Hi @j-ed,

Thanks. So just to confirm I understand - the (in this case Google) calendar file will be updated, at a rate defined by the Nextcloud cronjob?

Even when events have been added after that import?

If that’s the case, when looking in Settings>Administration>Basic settings> I’ve setup the cronjob as follows:

Use system cron service to call the cron.php file every 15 minutes. The cron.php needs to be executed by the system user “www-data”.

And I’ve just confirmed (using the “Last job ran XXXX ago.”) notification that it is running every 15 mins.

4

Based on the current documentation you should execute the cron job at least every 5min. Nextcloud executes internal jobs automatically if necessary.

5

Even though cron jobs run very often (which is good anyway), calendar subscriptions get refreshed by default every week - unless the subscription says otherwise.

https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/19392 introduces an admin setting to lower this interval.

1 Like
6

Can you please shed some light on how this parameter could be changed in the future, by setting a new configuration parameter, via a web dialog or by executing an occ command?

7

This looks to me like there might be a misunderstanding:
If you IMPORT an icalendar file - nothing will be refreshed.
You need to subscribe to the webcal-Link of the google calendar.
@j-ed and @tcit are referring to a subscription not an import of an *.ics-file

2 Likes
8 
occ config:app:set dav calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate --value=“%value%"

EDIT : It will probably be documented in https://docs.nextcloud.com/

2 Likes
9

Based on the commit log I assume this should work in 18.0.4? In my case, with 18.0.4, after having set calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate to PT1H, it still doesn’t seem to refresh at all, though.

I have a google calender subscribed to via an https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/my-email/private-id/basic.ics URL in my nextcloud calender but it hasn’t refreshed in a > 12 hours, i.e. it still shows test appointments I had deleted ~ 16h ago and doesn’t show new appointments created in the same timeframe.

There’s nothing in the nextcloud log and cron jobs are indeed running at a 5min interval. Verified that by setting a bad value for calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate in which case it logs an Sabre\VObject\InvalidDataException: The supplied iCalendar duration value is incorrect every 5 minutes.

Syncing the same feed in Thunderbird/Lightning shows the google calender as it actually is at this point in time, so I assume this is not a problem on the google side of things.

10

Have you double-checked that the changed value has been taken into account? As far as I remember the following command syntax need to be used to set the value:

occ config:app:set dav calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate --value=“PT30M”
11

My command was indeed missing something. The docs have been updated : https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/18/admin_manual/groupware/calendar.html#refresh-rate

1 Like
12

Actually, I think the reason is elsewhere. I just deleted the calendar subscription and added it back in while having an eye on the log. Turns out there’s an exception

SQLSTATE[22003]: Numeric value out of range: 1264 Out of range value for column 'lastoccurence' at row 1 at <<closure>>

(full log here) The calendar still appears on nextcloud, but I guess this will block/prevent any further updates?

13

If I read the actual SQL statement in the debug log correctly, lastoccurence is actually -1942185600 in this case and the event is some yearly birthday event (which I guess never ends).

14

Meanwhile, I have narrowed it down further: I have some events in my google’s .ics file where the DTEND entry looks like this:

DTEND;VALUE=DATE:18991230

These seem to be birthday reminders from contacts (just a handful) and the date is obviously crap.
But I suppose the nextcloud importer should still handle that in a controlled fashion…

So, given that the respective table’s column is an unsigned bigint, I’ve simply added a < 0 check
for $lastOccurrence in CalDavBackend:getDenormalizedData

if ($lastOccurrence < 0) {
    $maxDate = new DateTime(self::MAX_DATE);
    $lastOccurrence = $maxDate->getTimestamp();
}

This causes the importer to continue w/o exception and subsequently the PT30M refresh to work, too. I guess I’ll create a bug report.

1 Like
15

I’ve simply added a < 0 check
for $lastOccurrence in CalDavBackend:getDenormalizedData

This worked brilliantly for me! I can now re-sync my Google calendar.

Do you have a link to the bug report so I can follow it there?

16

Even though this post is rather old, I came across it when attempting to export data from a Nextcloud server. This calcardback little ditty is a treat!

It will export/backup both contacts and calendar with pure perfection! Even if one is unable to access Nextcloud via the web interface for any reason. Brilliant!

Here’s the link for calcardback:

https://codeberg.org/BernieO/calcardbackup