[Bug] Events view calendar widget dies silently [released]

asked 2015-10-28 08:23:44 +0300

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updated 2016-10-24 10:32:22 +0300

Manatus
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Events view calendar widget seems to "die" occasionally. It does not always show today's events, even when there are such events in the calendar. If I go to settings -> events, and disable and re-enable it, the calendar widget shows the events again.

UPDATE 24 October 2016:

I'm closing this one. Widget bug is fixed in 2.0.4.14, and the other bug is reproducible and is not related to original problem.

Cover/widget bug can be found here.

UPDATE 23 October 2016:

This bug should be fixed in 2.0.4.14 (looking at the release notes).

As witnessed earlier, it seems there are in fact two bugs. Actual "calendar widget dying" one that has now been fixed, and the other one where the event is not showing on both Calendar widget and cover.

In this latter situation any other events are visible in Calendar cover and widget, but one is missing.

Possibly this bug is related to situation where alarm of the event has been assigned to happen one day early. I'm guessing but it could be part of the mechanic how the cover handles ongoing events. If it assumes that the time when the event can be erased from the cover starts from the point of alarm, it could be considered as old meeting next day. This requires more testing.

Edit: First test was successful; I was able to reproduce the problem with Jolla1+activesync(nokia). CalDAV doesn't seem to suffer from this. Doing a second test after which I'll release this case and create another for this specific behavior.

UPDATE 14 Feb 2016: According to comments this problem is still very much alive with 2.0.1.7. I still haven't seen it happen with either of my Jolla phones, and I've checked them every day.

However, I haven't had many meetings lately, so I've had to fill up my calendars with simple test for every day (only name, time and alarm information). Maybe the reason is in the event details or their recurrence after all.

After typing above I started creating recurring events on the phone. Immediately calendar refused to show this information, while the second Jolla phone using the same calendar did. Other events showed up. Uptime for the phone was 12 days.

After that I restarted the calendar widget from the settings, and the recurring event showed up. Any newly created recurring events showed up immediately too.

Here is a journalctl log with the contents of that hour. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact moment it happened. The kernel messages have been filtered away to make the log shorter; I summarily read through the whole file and I suppose kernel messages don't contain any information on this issue.

There seems to have been old traces of google account and one old test email account under .cache/msync/sync but I'm not sure they have anything to do with this problem. There are some traces of possibly related problems.

UPDATE 2 Feb 2016: Haven't seen this happening on 2.0.1.7 yet in two weeks. I've had test events assigned for every day and have checked the status every morning on two Jolla phones.

According to paulvt in the comments this is still happening. I'll keep checking if it reproduces on my phones. There is also a possibility that when I deleted the calendar databases in January, the reason for the problem re-occurrence got wiped too.

Before Taalojärvi I came into conclusion that I could not find anything in the events themselves that could cause widget to fail.

I was able to reproduce problem on the Calendar cover page using the same event ID for multiple events, but this requires a hand crafted event or bad implementation on the server side. It does not happen on the phone side alone just like that.

UPDATE 23 Nov 2015: After uptime of 9 days the calendar widget part had died again, or at least it didn't show anything anymore. I had two events for this day; one full day event and second 30 minutes event in the afternoon. Calendar and calendar cover were showing events properly. Widget became alive again by disabling and enabling it under the events settings.

Full day event was created in Jolla. Afternoon event was imported from email attachment ics file in Jolla too. Both were synced to owncloud with caldav. Basically both of the events should have had minimal amount of content synced down from remote source.

I will use copies of both events and try to recreate the problem. I doubt it matters, but it is easy to test.

UPDATE 14 Nov 2015: According to comments I'm ruling out activesync as the main triggering action to the problem. Slow period for me with calendar, so additional troubleshooting may take time. It became evident earlier that simple test meetings created directly on Zimbra or Owncloud didn't trigger problems for me. Imported vcf-files from other sources, recurring events, acknowledged meetings or events with additional details may act differently.

UPDATE 6 Nov 2015: If anyone has seen this bug happening on SailfishOS that has only CalDAV calendar accounts configured (eg. not using activesync at all), please comment here. I'm still suspecting the problem is triggered by malformed event synced to the calendar by activesync.

I haven't had any problems for over a week now, unless I use the meeting I had problems with as a template. Unfortunately copying it here is useless as it has UID dependency on our company's Zimbra server database. It contains meeting request and approvals information and it has already been handled by OSX iCal. If the UID changes, the meeting syncs correctly.

While the triggering conditions of the problem seem to be in Zimbra, it does not bring much light to the original problem. I can only confirm that the event synced with CalDAV has correct information and shows in the Calendar app, its cover and Events view, versus activesync which has wrong ending date information and shows only in Calendar app.

UPDATE 3 Nov 2015: I was able to create ics-file that produces event that does not show on cover or events view. However: It seems to be a syncing issue with activesync against Zimbra 8.6. No idea if it happens with proper Exchange server.

What happens is that the meeting gets synced on Sailfish so, that the ending time for the meeting is on the previous day. This is probably what breaks the visibility ot the event in cover and events view.

In addition to this, the same meeting via CalDAV from owncloud completely refused to sync on the phone.

CalDAV from Zimbra however works, and shows the end date properly. So overall in Zimbra scenario activesync seems to be at fault. I also tested that the problem does not exist in Android Lollipop activesync (EAS 12.1).

Since the SailfishOS activesync implementation is undergoing a rewrite currently, I'm not sure if this particular stray of events is worth investigating more, at least not yet.

I'm not sure that the 'calendar widget dying' and this sync bug are related; When I first were able to "recover" the visibility of events under the Events view, disable and re-enable of the widget helped in that occasion. Now with this badly timed event it did not, nor were any events starting after that missing. Calendar widget was working, it was just not showing this one event.

UPDATE 2 Nov 2015: After the initial day I haven't experienced the problem again. Then again this time I've only had my test meetings in the calendar.

I still don't know if it is related to the original question, but Calendar application cover has a bug with specific kind of event/meeting. Its not the usual suspect, eg. recurring event, and more likely it has something to do with organizer or other data in the event.

When I had last time had problems with the widget (and cover) I had test events in my calendar meant for troubleshooting company Zimbra server calendar problems in case where OSX calendar was "stealing" ownership of the meeting. Those events that came before Jolla made test meetings, scheduled for the same day, were "touched" by OSX iCal. (Sidenote: OSX iCal is capable of cancelling meetings organized by other people, and this seems to be correct behavior. OSX iCal follows CalDAV RFC to the letter...)

UPDATE: Possibly this is related to the same API that Calendar cover uses. Sometimes it does not show all the meetings either. Both just lost afternoon events that were still visible couple of hours ago in the morning. Calendar application itself shows the events as usual.

UPDATE May, 12th 2016: Sadly to report that the bug even still exists on current SailfishOS update 2.0.1.11. (@Nekron)

UPDATE June, 21th 2016: Still not fixed in 2.0.2.45 (@dmnk)