Calendar Entries - Scheduled Time One Hour Later Than Set

Bug Reports
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#41

@flypig Yes, and No. Because of all the issues are with synchronisation of Exchange (Office365) accounts, specifically (and all of which I’ve previously reported as bugs):

  • Accounts fail to sync with errors when network changes from mobile to wireless and vice versa
  • Email auto synchronise just completely stops randomly with no more auto sync until you re-boot
  • Not all email folders are shown, so if I have say 30 email folders on my Exchange accounts, then only 20 of them, seemingly at random, get shown and can be used/accessed when you swipe left to the folder view
  • Calendar issues (i.e. dates later than they should be, all day events spilling over into the next day when they should not be, etc)
  • Contact issues (favourites disappear, duplicates, etc)

I decided I’d had enough as it was just not usable or reliable enough. So all of the above are still happening on XA2 on 4.3 as of last week.

However, having found that Office 365 also supports imap synchronisation I have, last weekend, changed all my Office 365 accounts from Exchange Sync to IMAP sync.

But since Office 365 does not support caldav or carddav I have had to make some other changes as I need both calendar and contacts - and obviously moving from Exchange sync to IMAP sync I have now lost the ability to synchronise my calendar and contacts with Office365. So:

  • I have moved my calendars to my home NAS server (Synology) and now sync calendars with this across all my devices using caldav.
  • I have moved my contacts onto the synology NAS server, but I can’t yet get carddav to work with this. This is probably due to not getting the syntax right on the carddav account on SFOS as it doesn’t seem to be standard across ios, android, windows, linux, etc. And SFOS seems to have a weird combined carddav/caldav account layout which I can’t quite work out yet (eg: if I set the port on the server for caldav, then its not right for carddav and vice versa). So the upshot at the moment is that I have moved all my contacts locally onto SFOS until I can figure carddav out.

The result of all these changes are:

  • IMAP email sync to Office 365 works just fine - no missing folders, no sync errors, auto sync does not fail or stop. In short it works reliably and well.
  • Calendar sync to my NAS server also works reliably and well - entries are at the right time and not one hour late, all day entries are scheduled only for the days they are meant to be, not those days +1
  • Contact favourites work and persist as they should with no duplicates (well obviously, because they are static and not sync’d).

So all is good and the problems have all been ‘resolved’ by these changes - even if it was all a bit of a pain to make them.

Seems to me that the inescapable conclusion, and perhaps why so few forum members have these bugs (because it appears that Exchange is not widely used), is that pretty much all of the above problems come from bugs in the Exchange sync plugin code?

#42

Just as a side note, the time zone on the synology NAS is ‘United Kingdom, London’ - the same as my SFOS XA2.

#43

Also see IMAP Email Setup Bugs on 4.3 as one of the setup issues I had when specifying a peak synchronisation time range for the IMAP email account to Office365 was that, yes, you’ve guessed it, the time range ended up being an hour later than I set it.

#44

So just to clarify this point, as of a couple of weeks ago before you switched to CalDAV, and using 4.3 Suomenlinna, you still experienced Exchange events moving by an hour as a result of a sync?

I want to separate this from all day events spilling over into the next day (which I’m looking into separately). I appreciate it’s tempting to bundle all of the issues together, but when it comes to fixing them, it’s really helpful to keep things isolated.

#45
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#46

Thanks, that’s really helpful to know. I’ve tried all sorts of Office365 combinations (different server timezones, different device timezones, different event timezones) and haven’t been able to reproduce it, so I must still be missing some crucial aspect. I will persevere.

Understood, thank you!

#47

@flypig Happy to send you a meeting invite from my office365 account to see if it will trigger the issue if that might help. I still have my calendar ‘frozen’ on there since I moved the version I use to the NAS.

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#48

Thank you for the offer. I’ve sent an email to the address you mentioned earlier. If you could reply back with an invitation, that would be great. Let’s see what happens.

#49

Thank you, the invitation has arrived okay.

#50

Just to follow up on this, we’ve made changes to our Exchange sync code to better handle timezone information on events. Most notably, whereas timezones were being synced only for recurring or all day events, the information is now synced for all events types. The Microsoft to IANA timezone conversion has also been made more robust.

As I’m not able to reproduce the issue on my device/server combination, I can’t be entirely certain that this will address the original issue, but I believe it should help.

At the same time, we also looked at the issue of all day event overhangs (where they cross over into the next day), and all day recurring event exceptions. Both of which should now work correctly.

The changes won’t make it into the next release I’m afraid, but likely the one after.

Thanks @Steve_Everett for your help with this, and for lodging the original report.

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