Calendar feed issue – Ical not updating after change
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Hello a number of our users (https://stockwoodparkrfc.co.uk) reported having issues where the calendar feeds were not updating when changes were made to fixtures on certain devices/software. One example was BusyCal on the Mac and also some versions of android operating system. After some research we discovered that some software/devices not only look at the date last updated in the Ical but also look at the E-tag in the page header before they look at the date updated on each record in the Ical. This is to stop unnecessary scanning of each record to see if changed. So – E-tag is checked first (E-tag is MD5 hash of output) and if different from previous then check each record to see if updated.
We made this change to get this working in the ical.php file in the feeds folder.
—-start of code snippet from ical.php
// End output
$output .= “END:VCALENDAR”;// Print headers
header(‘Content-type: text/calendar; charset=utf-8’);// ***Modification Start
// The E-Tag is not being changed when the output file is generated – Some Webdav clients do not like this and
// do not then ‘see’ that the file has changed – updates to the calendars are then not displayed to the user.$etag = md5($output);
header(‘Etag:’ . ‘”‘.$etag.'”‘);// ***Modification End
header(‘Content-Disposition: inline; filename=’ . $post->post_name . ‘.ics’);
// Print content
echo $output;——–end of code snippet from ical.php
Can we get this included as standard – assuming we haven’t broken anything else by doing this. ??
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ok, so check the following – these are some things we have found;
1) The feeds update every 2 minutes on the website if I remember correctly – BUT – you need to check that your calendars are also refreshing every X minutes. The update will only occur after the longer of the durations. By default the MAC and Google are sometimes set to only refresh 1 time per year. This is set when you subscribe and depending on the version of OS you may or may not get the option to set this when you initial subscribe but you can change it afterwards.
2) For apple devices you cannot add any of these calendars to the iCloud and use iCloud to sync across your devices. If you have for example a iPhone and a Mac you must add them to the iphone as a local calendar and then also to the Mac as a local calendar. For some reason when these calendars are added to the iCloud and not local they do not ever update. It’s a bit of a pain as you have to add to each device. This appears to be an Apple issue as the feeds were updating – we could see on the website feed the change was appearing.(See (4) below on how to do this) it was something on the apple device in the iCloud that was preventing this.
3) For google calendars we sometimes we had an intermittent issue but were not yet able to resolve – 99% of the time it works. We also had an issue with google where for some reason some people were not able to subscribe – you just get an error message – we were not yet able to resolve.
4) Any change to the calendar – including a comment such as you describe should trigger the update. Each record in the feed has a ‘date updated’ time stamp which is update when a change is made. This date is completely separate to the date/time of the event. You can see this in the ‘curl’ output – see below.
To see if the calendar feed is picking up the change you make to the fixture you can use the CURL command (Linux/Mac) and see if the new data is appearing in the feed – this means website is ok and feed is ok – it must then be the client that has some issue.
curl -i https://stockwoodparkrfc.co.uk/calendar/fixtures-u17?
the above looked at the feed from the website : stockwoodwoodparkrfc.co.uk
and at the event list called : fixtures-u17
Hope this might help!
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