Reoccuring events now require an end date

We have several events (high council meeting, presidency meetings, making reservations at the stake center, etc) that had been set to reoccur with no end date. With the new release, the no end date is no longer available, and the default end date is two years from today's date.

At the stake level we like being able to create reoccurring events with no end date. Will this be re-enabled in the future?

Also, when I try to save the event with the new "default" end date, I receive an error stating the highlighted box needs to be fixed, meaning I have to find a new date that is less than 2 years out and fits the parameters of the repeating event. This is very annoying....

Finally, once I work around the date issues and go to save, the tool seems to hang and the updates don't get saved. I've worked around schedule conflicts, so it should be clear to save, but I just see the gray screen with the spinning bar. I've left it along for 10+ minutes before giving up. Is this a problem with the new release, or are the church servers not responding to my changes?

This seems to be an issue with repeating events and reservations that go a ways out in the future. Other single events I can save and edit without issues.

Thanks for you help.

grantw wrote:Will this be re-enabled in the future?

Not likely. The database structure was changed. It was decided to limit it to two years to avoid too much strain on the database. But as you've discovered, even then, there's problems if the event covers too many days.

I had similar issues with creating new event or updating existing events. The servers were simply not responding. I'm checking in to what happened but I'm able to create and update events now without an issue. Are you still seeing issues with saving updates?

Also the two year limit is a permanent feature. However we could add a note to that section of the event details window stating that there is a two year limit so that it would be evident prior to saving.

kyleq wrote:Also the two year limit is a permanent feature.

So those Easter dates I had put in the calendar out to 2016 are gone now. Oh, well....

I sorely miss the no end date feature. In our stake center we have 3 wards plus the stake using the building. It was a great feature to block out Sunday meetings, Monday nights, and monthly reoccurring once and forget about the blocks. Now we can only put out a block for two years and hope that no one comes in to schedule the resource between the time the block expires and the building scheduler puts the block back in for the next two years.

Still having trouble saving the repeating events -- may be the servers are still having problems responding.

This one messed up several of my calendars as well. Particularly, I have a "Holidays" calendar that defines the standard holidays like New Years Day, Mother's Day, etc. I had defined them as being "Every January 1", or "Every 2nd Sunday in May". Rather than just truncate the repetition or assuming it as two years out, those calendar entries were simply deleted. So even this year there is no Halloween next Monday. My kids will be really disappointed...

I also noted that other repeating events have problems. For example if I have a event that repeats each Thursday in October 2011, I would have defined the first one on 10/6, and specified that it repeats every week on Thursday, with an end date of 10/27. In the V1 calendar that worked fine and gave me entries on 10/6, 10/13, 10/20, and 10/27. With the new calendar, the last repetition on 10/27 is omitted. I think someone must have coded a "less than" rather than a "less than or equal" in determining when to end the repetition.

ThomsonMA wrote:I also noted that other repeating events have problems. For example if I have a event that repeats each Thursday in October 2011, I would have defined the first one on 10/6, and specified that it repeats every week on Thursday, with an end date of 10/27. In the V1 calendar that worked fine and gave me entries on 10/6, 10/13, 10/20, and 10/27. With the new calendar, the last repetition on 10/27 is omitted. I think someone must have coded a "less than" rather than a "less than or equal" in determining when to end the repetition.

Hmm. I'm not seeing that problem. I created a repeating event exactly as you stated: repeating weekly each Thursday starting on 10/6 with an end date of 10/27. The 10/27 instance does indeed appear. I tried all day events, and timed events. In every case, the instance on the last date does appear. And since I note that you are in the same time zone as I am, I don't see how it can be related to time zone issues.

I'm also really missing the no end date feature. In 2 years from now I'll now need to check each event to make sure it's not going to unexpectedly expire. Seems like that's going to be pretty problematic once events start hitting the 2 year mark.

ballam wrote:I'm also really missing the no end date feature. In 2 years from now I'll now need to check each event to make sure it's not going to unexpectedly expire. Seems like that's going to be pretty problematic once events start hitting the 2 year mark.

I'd recommend that you check repeating events annually, and extend them another year if they do need to continue perpetually. That way you'll never hit the 2 year mark.

I guess I should have been more clear that I was referring to events that were moved forward from the V1 calendar. If it was created in the V1 calendar, the last instance didn't show up after the V2 update. I'd click on the first instance to open the edit dialog, and it looked correct. But until I reset the ending date to the day after the real ending date, I wouldn't get that last on one the calendar. Using my previous example, I'd have to set the ending date to 10/28 rather than 10/27 to get an instance of the event on 10/27.

I did try to create an event on V2 and it seems to function correctly as aebrown noted.

ThomsonMA wrote:I guess I should have been more clear that I was referring to events that were moved forward from the V1 calendar. If it was created in the V1 calendar, the last instance didn't show up after the V2 update. I'd click on the first instance to open the edit dialog, and it looked correct. But until I reset the ending date to the day after the real ending date, I wouldn't get that last on one the calendar. Using my previous example, I'd have to set the ending date to 10/28 rather than 10/27 to get an instance of the event on 10/27.

But even with that clarification, I'm not seeing what you are seeing. I have some repeating events that were migrated from v1 that have an end date that matches the repeating pattern, and those end dates to appear as instances. So there must be some additional factor affecting your events that didn't affect mine. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but the first couple of events that matched this pattern did seem to work properly.

Deleting events without end dates was not cool. Too bad it didn't just automatically put an end date two years out. Now I have to go into my Holidays & Observances calendar and enter all of the events again.

mnmpeterson wrote:Deleting events without end dates was not cool. Too bad it didn't just automatically put an end date two years out. Now I have to go into my Holidays & Observances calendar and enter all of the events again.

Did you actually have events get deleted that were within the two-year time frame? I had lots of repeating events without end dates in v1, and the events are all still there. It's just that they now have end dates, so I lost the future instances of those events that were past the 2-year mark. In my experience the migration did exactly what you said it was "too bad" it didn't do.

mnmpeterson wrote:Deleting events without end dates was not cool. Too bad it didn't just automatically put an end date two years out. Now I have to go into my Holidays & Observances calendar and enter all of the events again.

Your holiday's did not get deleted because they did not have an end date. No holidays or birthdays were included from the v1 data. Our system simply wouldn't be able to handle every ward creating their own holiday calendar and birthday calendar.

Online calendar services like Google get around this problem two ways. a) By providing built-in holiday calendars that people can use. b) By having way more resources than we have.

We hadn't thought it would be necessary to overcome the holiday issue, but based on the number of holiday events we had to skip over when importing the data, we are considering offering built-in holiday calendars, similar to what Google does.

jdcr256 wrote:Your holiday's did not get deleted because they did not have an end date. No holidays or birthdays were included from the v1 data. Our system simply wouldn't be able to handle every ward creating their own holiday calendar and birthday calendar.

Online calendar services like Google get around this problem two ways. a) By providing built-in holiday calendars that people can use. b) By having way more resources than we have.

We hadn't thought it would be necessary to overcome the holiday issue, but based on the number of holiday events we had to skip over when importing the data, we are considering offering built-in holiday calendars, similar to what Google does.

The problem with not including holidays is all the wards in the stake will enter holidays in their own calendars, thus, magnifying the problem. Some units are even duplicating holidays in multiple calendars within the ward. At least a stake-level holiday calendar helps resolve the issue until a built-in holiday calendar goes live.

jdcr256 wrote:Your holiday's did not get deleted because they did not have an end date. No holidays or birthdays were included from the v1 data. Our system simply wouldn't be able to handle every ward creating their own holiday calendar and birthday calendar.

We created a single holiday calendar at the stake level. It's a calendar that contains far less than 1% of the events in our stake. So I find it hard to believe that it would overwhelm the resources in any way. If wards created birthday calendars for every member, I could see how that impact might be significant. But holidays? No way.

In any case, holidays are an important part of scheduling, and deleting those events without even mentioning them in the release notes wasn't particularly helpful. With no clear communication on this topic, the likely result of your deletions is that people will grumble a lot about the deletion and then just go in and create those calendars again. So you'll have the resource problem you had anyway, with users more unhappy about the extra work.

If this issue is important, I'd suggestion you face it head-on and communicate what you expect wards and stakes to do (or not do) in this area.

aebrown wrote:Did you actually have events get deleted that were within the two-year time frame? I had lots of repeating events without end dates in v1, and the events are all still there. It's just that they now have end dates, so I lost the future instances of those events that were past the 2-year mark. In my experience the migration did exactly what you said it was "too bad" it didn't do.

I lost all my Holidays. Most of those were repeating events with no ends dates (such as Dec 25th).

RussellHltn wrote:I lost all my Holidays. Most of those were repeating events with no ends dates (such as Dec 25th).

Yeah, jdcr256 answered the question in the very next post. I lost all my holidays, too -- I just hadn't looked at them yet. When I asked my question, I had only looked at other calendars, and in those case, recurring events with no end dates were not deleted, but were simply supplied with an end date 2 years out. Once I saw that holiday calendars were treated specially in the migration, I looked at my Holiday calendar and saw that all events were gone.

Well, until the church decides to add their own Holiday calendar, I guess I'll just have to go back to recreating it.

This is getting seriously frustrating.

jdcr256 wrote:No holidays or birthdays were included from the v1 data. Our system simply wouldn't be able to handle every ward creating their own holiday calendar and birthday calendar.

That's worrisome. I'm having a hard time constructing a data model where each unit creating a Holiday would cause an undue strain on the system. So far our stake in still sticking it's toes in the water. Assuming we're not the last stake to do so, I would think a far greater load is soon to come.

we posted the holidays to our stake general events calendar and only did 2 years worth. will extend them next year for an additional year IF the church does not give us a Holiday calendar by then