recurring items

[phw198]

Just did the very first sync - have been using Exchange for years and needed things in Google calendar as well. After the sync, it totally mangled hundreds of old recurring items that had expired, and reinterpreted their end dates to be much later, so now my currently calendar has hundreds of items everywhere. This is despite saying I want 7 days in the last and 120 days in future!!

I happened to set logging level to debug, so have a log file which is attached.

Please help! This is a disaster!

Work Item Details

Original CodePlex Issue: Issue 510 Status: Proposed Reason Closed: Unassigned Assigned to: Unassigned Reported on: Wed at 5:45 AM Reported by: DavidWerdiger Updated on: Thu at 6:28 PM Updated by: elizabethmcintosh

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CodePlex Issue #510 Plain Text Attachments

[phw198]

On 2017-05-10 13:18:36 UTC, DavidWerdiger commented:

I checked some of the recurring items, and they are all set to end after 999 recurrences instead of their original settings. I don't have a way to restore their original settings, and certainly not with a script! I welcome any suggestions on how to do this.

[phw198]

On 2017-05-10 14:38:53 UTC, phw198 commented:

Sorry to hear of the problems you've had. Here's my understanding of what's happened, correct me for any points that aren't right:

You had used some other sync program at some point in the past to create events in Google to match your Exchange ones. You configured OGCS to sync into that same Google calendar OGCS "reclaimed" those existing Google events and matched them to the Exchange ones It then merged at differences from Google back in to Exchange

OGCS didn't create these recurring Google events with 999 occurrences, but unfortunately for you, as you had 2-way sync on, it has merged them back in. I can't think of any way of undoing this :-(

As to why it synced more data than expected, that's the nature of a recurring series - the first recurrence is the "owner" of all the others and if the series spans your sync range, the whole series will be synced.

Not that it helps you right now, but I will give some thought as to how to help others avoid getting into your situation. Syncing into a calendar with pre-existing items can be a bad idea - I need to make that clearer...

[phw198]

On 2017-05-10 20:02:21 UTC, DavidWerdiger commented:

Thanks for the prompt response.

A few years ago I did sync with another product which I no longer use, and a similar effect happened, but only on a handful of recurring calendar items. I also tried Gmail4Outlook recently (and it works OK for contacts), and it said it synced but nothing appeared in Google calendar. The only things in my Google calendar were items placed there as a result of Google calendar invitations.

The recurring events when in Exchange all had far fewer than 999 occurrences, so how did that get mangled?

Any idea what I can do about them now?

[phw198]

Unfortunately, there's very little I can think of to fix this except manually going through and correcting the number of occurrences on each recurring series :unamused: I'm quite sure though that the 999 occurrences was not originated by OGCS.

Notes for enhancements:

• Warn on first sync if target calendar is not empty.
• "Dry run" mode that just logs what would happen without saving changes.