Calendar import and synchronising
By ugenda on Monday, 19 December 2022
Posted in JEvents (Free Access)
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I have set up an import of a calendar with events from an other site. The import works fine, but it doesn't import the image associated with an event, since an image is not a part of the iCal specification. That is ok. The import still saves the event location al lot of time adding events one by one to our calendar.
Also nice is that the import updates events, when changes are made to the source calendar. But the import also overrides other fields, that are not standard in iCal. When we add an image to en event in JEvents, the image is removed the next time we sync.

How can we add images to events that are imported, without having them removed each update? The source iCal calendar feed, does have a specific image field as an extra field. It is added by the Wordpress plugin Timely Calendar. See: https://thiemeloods.nl/programma/
It is theoretically possible the standard images addon for JEvents and the custom fields addon can import custom values not in the iCal specification but not in the format supplied by this server. You would need a script to convert the format and rename this field prior to importing into JEvents
geraint
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2 years ago
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Two questions:
How can I import extra fields in the iCal feed into a custom field?
And am I correct that a synchronising overwrites all the existing data, including images (which seem to be stored in a serrate database table).
ugenda
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2 years ago
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See https://www.jevents.net/frequently-asked-questions/importing-events-in-csv-format - notice how we have extra columns for custom fields
geraint
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2 years ago
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Thank you for pointing this out, I've used this before when migrating from our old calendar extension, Joomla Event Manager, to JEvents. But this is importing csv. (Which is more flexible with custom fields) The format we're importing from the other site, and where my question is about, is iCal / ics.
ugenda
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2 years ago
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Sorry for the poor level of support over the year end.

You should be able to add custom fields to the ICS file in the same way so if you use a column title 'jevtags' in the CSV file with values "fred,My Tag" - it should be possible to add

jevtags:fred,My Tag

as a line in the ICS file.
geraint
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2 years ago
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Quoted from geraint on Thursday, 05 January 2023
Sorry for the poor level of support over the year end.

You should be able to add custom fields to the ICS file in the same way so if you use a column title 'jevtags' in the CSV file with values "fred,My Tag" - it should be possible to add

jevtags:fred,My Tag

as a line in the ICS file.


Apologies accepted. You're support during the past year was superb, so a little holiday break is well deserved.

To make things clear: I have no control over the ics I'm importing. And the ics has a reference field to multiple sizes of the WordPress image.
ugenda
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2 years ago
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I could write some custom code to pick up this data within the standard images/files extension in JEvents.

Do you have any budget for custom work like this?
geraint
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2 years ago
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Hi Geraint,

Thank you for your offer. We are connecting to other event calendars where we get the data either through a xml or a json feed. A programmer created a custom cli-script for us, with connectors for each feed. (Not all have the same structure) It would be best for us to ask the organisation in question here, to build a xml feed where we can hook into.
The advantage of our solution is that it not only grabs the correct image, it also has an option to match locations and categories that might have a different names in the source.

But there are more calendars were few want to hook into via iCal. It would be nice to have a least set a default image (since there's a limitation to ics and images general) and a default location for a certain feed, like you can set a default category.
ugenda
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2 years ago
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See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5545#section-3.8.1.1 - we may be able to support and image attached to an event in the ical specification using ATTACH
geraint
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2 years ago
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