I use an iOS shared calendar as a tile on my dashboards, but some appointments, typically the ones added via an ical event (not the manually added ones) show the incorrect time. Apple shows the correct time of a hair appointment at 10am to 12:30pm, including GMT-4, but Sharptools reports it at 6:00am to 8:30am, 4 hours behind. The only difference I can see is the inclusion of the GMT-4, even though that is correct.
Is there a way to fix this without having to change the time zone from an iPhone (can’t do it from the Mac program) for every ical event we add? I can’t find anything that looks wrong on the actual calendar, just the sharptools calendar.
I agree that it seems like a reasonable clue. It’s also interesting that it’s 4 hours earlier than what we would expect it to be. If it was falling back to GMT time without the offset, you would think it would be 4 hours later. So it’s almost like the calendar entry already has the 4 hour offset applied to it and the calendar parsing is applying the 4 hour offset again.
Can you share more details about how these are added? Just curious if there’s any further clues there.
I may end up needing to see a sample of the iCal file to see if I can figure out what’s going on. If you’re comfortable sending the iCal URL directly to support@sharptools.io, feel free to do so and I’ll take a closer look. Otherwise it might be helpful if you could setup another demo calendar and share that or describe how I might reproduce this on my own.
So my girlfriend uses vagaro.com to book her appointments, and it gives the option to import the ical to our calendar. I use booksy.com to do mine, which also gives me the option to import the ical, from within the app.
I just sent over the link and one of my ical events.
Thanks, Chris! I responded with my analysis of the sample file. Let me know what times you expected to see for that event. I suspect the issue could be related to the lack of timezone information included with the calendar entry. I would check if Vagaro/Booksy have options for including the timezone with the entries or at least outputting in UTC time a s a base.
Edit: We pushed an update that resolves this. The calendar tile now sends across the timezone from your browser to use as a fallback if the calendar doesn’t explicitly include a timezone.
I am having the same issue with calendars shared from outlookcom. My calendar shows items in the correct time zone (US Eastern). My wife’s is showing incorrectly as 4 hours earlier than this.
If you want to send over a calendar URL that isn’t working as expected to support@sharptools.io we would be happy to take a closer look.
When Chris sent over his sample, we pushed out two updates as a result:
Floating Timezones
The calendar tile passes the timezone from your browser over and uses that as a fallback for calendar events that use a floating timezone (eg. no explicit timezone specified).
GMT-XX Timezones
The calendaring system now parses the offset and applies it to the calendar entry so you should get the correct time.
When I was investigating the above, I read some examples online about Outlook sometimes using non-standard timezone identifiers, so I’m wondering if that could be the case with your wife’s calendar. If it is the case, you might be able to change the calendar timezone configuration to a standard timezone. If not, I would be happy to take a closer look if you want to share the sample URL.
