Calendar sync for all-day events does not inherit notification settings from a particular calendar

Helios · April 16, 2017, 5:50pm

All-day events that are created in Google calendar during sync are all assigned a notification “1 day before on 23:45”. One would expect this to be inherited from a particular calendar’s settings.

Since calendar sync dumps all events from a list at once, it’s not very easy then to go and change their notification settings one by one. Using calendar settings would be much more comfortable

Erica · April 17, 2017, 3:18am

I think it does inherit from the chosen calendar right now.

For example, my test calendar has no notification enabled, and the events synced to it have no notification either.

I also see no difference between all-day and non-all-day events.

Could it be you’ve switched calendar to sync to before so events went into different calendars?

Helios · April 17, 2017, 8:02am

I actually tried deleting and re-creating calendars several times, settings their settings, disabling and enabling sync in dynalist - all to no effect

I’ll try to post specific steps for reproducibility later

Erica · April 18, 2017, 8:17am

Ok, thank you!

You can create a new test calendar for the purpose of reproducing the bug, as that would allow both of us to start from a clean state.

Helios · April 19, 2017, 9:33am

Okay, here it is:

I created a new calendar

Edited its notification settings

Disabled existing calendar sync, changed sync settings to this new calendar

Enabled sync for a newly created list

Added two date events, one with time and another - an all-day event

Waited for sync

Notifications are set correctly for the event with time defined

Notification times are wrong for the all-day event

Same when calendar is synced in iOS, for example. Here it’s all correct for time-specific event:

For an all-day event for some reason the “on the day” time is correct, but “day before” notification is wrong

Erica · April 19, 2017, 10:25am

I think I follow the steps, but there’s one thing I don’t understand: isn’t 23:45 pm the day before same as 15 minutes before, assuming the event starts at midnight?

Helios · April 19, 2017, 12:26pm

Ah, you see, there is a separate setting for time-specific events and a separate setting for all-day events in google calendar. For this example it is set to “9:00 on the day of the event” and “22:00 one day before”. Here is the screenshot again:

Erica · April 19, 2017, 2:51pm

I see. Sorry about that, we were never Google Calendar power users ourselves.

From looking at the code, it doesn’t seem like we’ve explicitly set the notification time, so it should by default inherit the calendar’s setting. Might be Google’s problem, I’m not sure yet, needs confirmation from @Shida.

@Shida: what do you think about this?

Shida · April 20, 2017, 6:34am

In current implementation, we didn’t specify anything about reminders at the moment when syncing to Google Calendar.

Looking at Google Calendar’s API, I found an option that explicitly asks Google Calendar to use the default settings for reminders. I tried using it and it didn’t work

So at this point, I believe it’s a bug in Google Calendar’s API. That’s not something we can change, especially knowing that Google has notoriously bad customer support (or rather, no support at all).

The only workaround I can think of is overriding the reminder directly, but that would involve having an interface in Dynalist to configure the reminder override, saving it to your account, and using that when syncing with Google Calendar. It’s a fair amount of work, so I don’t believe that’s something we’ll be able to do right now given our priorities.