Events from other ORGANIZERs not editable

[Spot]

Hello and thank you for this wonderful software.

Since a few days my calendar entries are broken after a fresh setup with DAVdroid. They get synchronized to the phone, but there I am not able to edit them (they are locked). Also they are saved as appointments/invitation, so I get the button which asks me if I want to take part in the event. This happens to any kind of event, even if there was no invitation sent. Finally all events are shown as “public”, even if they are not public on the server.

I never had this problem before, but lately I updated my phone to Android 5.1 and I also installed a new version of DAVdroid. I tried with multiple calendar apps and all show this problem, so I guess it is not the phone’s fault. The server is a remotely hosted OwnCloud, I guess it is 8.1. I tried with DAVdroid 1.0.5 and 1.0.3, I would love to try with an older version, too.

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/350777/00045841/

[rfc2822]

You have used another account name, so the ORGANIZER field has changed (Android uses the account name as ORGANIZER). Only the ORGANIZER may edit the events (when using the Android calendar).

[Spot]

If I understand it correctly, I have a really big problem now. The calendar entries were imported to OwnCloud from a previous Kerio Exchange account. So these previous events already had a different organizer than the events created in OwnCloud and later in Android.

Do you know any method to bulk update the owner of all the events? And why has this been no problem in earlier versions of DAVdroid, was this field ignored during the sync?

Thanks for any advice!

[rfc2822]

@Spot DAVdroid behavior hasn’t changed (concerning ORGANIZER). Can’t you just create a DAVdroid account which has the same name as your ORGANIZER?

[Spot]

This is a problem because the events were imported from different sources. The really old ones are from a Palm Pilot, the newer ones from the Kerio server and the most recent ones from the OwnCloud and Android. So obviously they all have different ORGANIZER-entries, which was no problem until recently and for that reason was not noticable at all for me as a user.

But you are right, if I use an organizer with the same name in DAVdroid, I am able to change the events. It is just not practical in this case.

[rfc2822]

So obviously they all have different ORGANIZER-entries, which was no problem until recently and for that reason was not noticable at all for me as a user.

I can’t understand that, because I had this problem/feature (as you call it) myself a long time ago, and as I said, DAVdroid behavior didn’t change. However, I guess that your old events didn’t have any ORGANIZER, in which case the current DAVdroid account name is automatically used (by Android’s Contact Provider, not by DAVdroid!). So you might have not experienced any problems, because there were no different ORGANIZERs (but always the account name).

Theoretically, DAVdroid could override the ORGANIZER for events which are created/updated on the Android device and remove it or set something else. However, I didn’t see any reason to change Android’s default behavior.

Maybe you can mass-edit the events on your server (e.g. directly in the database).

[Spot]

No, I have no access to the server database. You said you had this problem before, how did you solve it?

I googled and I did not find any other posts about this problem. I can hardly imagine that this never occurred to anybody using Android before.

[Spot]

By the way, even a client which has access to the ORGANIZER field would be helpful, so I could at least fix single entries. Neither Owncloud doesn’t provide this in the web UI, nor does Thunderbird with Lightning.

[pmprog]

I registered to say that you’re not alone, Spot. Since I swapped from my LG L7 II (Android 4.2) to the Wileyfox Swift (CyanogenOS 12), and I too now can’t edit events downloaded from my ownCloud server that weren’t created on the phone. Only just found this out today when trying to edit the time on one of my calendar entries.

I also found this which seems related - http://forums.androidcentral.com/sprint-galaxy-s-ii-epic-4g-touch/147208-calendar-appointments-can-t-edited.html

This might not be a DAVdroid issue, but rather the calendar app’s, but it’s none-the-less extremely annoying. I might just have to find a different calendar app (apparently there’s no Month view in the new one either, which is just stupid and contrary to what I’d call progress, but that’s a rant for another day)

[Spot]

I don’t know whether I would call that good news
At least the entries created directly in OwnCloud seem to be kind of generic, which means they can be edited regardless of the name chosen for the DAVdroid account.
At least your problem with the calendar month view might be resolved. Search for “calendar” in the FDroid app store and you get “Etar”, which is a nice calendar interface with month view.

[rfc2822]

Since ical4android 4a80de4, the ORGANIZER field will not be set if there are no attendees because RFC 5545 3.8.4.3 Organizer says:

This property MUST NOT be specified in an iCalendar object […] that defines calendar components that are not group-scheduled components, but are components only on a single user’s calendar.

[Spot]

Does this mean I could e export all appointments and reimport them with ical4android to remove the wrongly set ORGANIZER field?

[rfc2822]

@Spot Theoretically, re-uploading the events with DAVdroid 1.0.7 should remove the ORGANIZER. So you could export and import all events, yes.