Calendar Module - Unable to load Facebook Birthdays

robbythedude

Hey All,

I’ve setup the Calendar module on the MagirMirror, but I’ve hit a snag. The Facebook Calendar for Birthdays won’t load.

Using the same Birthday Calendar URL, I’ve imported the calendar into my Google’s Calendar no problem.
I’ve visited the Birthday Calendar URL via Internet Browser and download the ICS file. The ICS file contains the Birthdays from my Facebook.
I’ve successfully loaded my Facebook Upcoming Events Calendar with no problem into the Calendar module.
If I only try loading the Facebook Birthday Calendar, I receive the “No upcoming events.” message.

Here is my configuration for the Calendar module.
http://pastebin.com/ZGWzuQgs

Any ideas? Could this be a problem caused elsewhere?

Thanks,
Rob

KirAsh4

Your FB Birthdays link is wrong. It’s supposed to be in this form:

{
    url: 'webcal://www.facebook.com/ical/b.php?uid=YOUR_FB_UID&key=KEY_PROVIDED_BY_FB'
}

To find that address, follow these steps:

On Facebook, click on your Events link (usually from the left hand menu)
On the Events page, look at the bottom of the right hand side for the following block of links:
Hover over, and copy the link that reads ‘Birthdays’
Paste it in your config.js for MM.

My config section for that is what you see above and it works just fine.

robbythedude

@KirAsh4 said in Calendar Module - Unable to load Facebook Birthdays:

Your FB Birthdays link is wrong. It’s supposed to be in this form:
{
    url: 'webcal://www.facebook.com/ical/b.php?uid=YOUR_FB_UID&key=KEY_PROVIDED_BY_FB'
}
To find that address, follow these steps:

On Facebook, click on your Events link (usually from the left hand menu)

On the Events page, look at the bottom of the right hand side for the following block of links:

Hover over, and copy the link that reads ‘Birthdays’

Paste it in your config.js for MM.

My config section for that is what you see above and it works just fine.

I’ve tried the webcal link as well, no luck. I’ve followed the steps you mentioned orignally, but that wasn’t working. I read on another post to try http instead of webcal. Neither work.

What is really throwing me off is why would Facebook Upcoming Event’s URL work but NOT Facebook Birthday’s URL???

KirAsh4

Don’t know what to tell you, mine’s working just fine with the webcal address. Have you tried stripping everything and just putting that in, nothing else?

KirAsh4

Shear curiosity, can you check the console logs, or simply run 'pm2 logs <YOUR_MM_PROCESS>' and see if there are any helpful messages about the calendar there, specifically the one that’s failing …

robbythedude

@KirAsh4 said in Calendar Module - Unable to load Facebook Birthdays:

Shear curiosity, can you check the console logs, or simply run 'pm2 logs <YOUR_MM_PROCESS>' and see if there are any helpful messages about the calendar there, specifically the one that’s failing …

Nothing that looks wrong…
Logs here: http://pastebin.com/3572PdeE

The Keys and IDs are exactly the same between my Birthday and Upcoming Events URLs…The Calendar only outputs the Upcoming Events, gahhh

Here is full config I’m using: http://pastebin.com/hDjMmTfa

squidsmarks

I’ve got the same issue. Was able import upcoming events but not birthdays.

robbythedude

I’ve been playing around with some stuff trying to figure this out and I noticed something…

Is it possible that my Upcoming Events Calendar is overwriting the Birthday Calendar?? When I download the ICS file from Facebook, both the Birthday and Upcoming Events ICS files have the same name! Named this: “u” + USERID + “.ics”

Possible that the MagicMirror is pulling down the ICS files, but overwriting each other because of same name?

robbythedude

I ran my Facebook Birhtday ICS file through this site: http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/
Got this response: http://imgur.com/YW07yKU

Is this normal?

squidsmarks

Both my Facebook calendar links are different. Birthdays contains a b.php and events is u.php. Tried birthdays by itself and still didn’t work.

KirAsh4

For those of you who are having issues with your Facebook Birthdays calendar … if any of you want to PRIVATELY send me your actual link, I will stick it in my config and see what happens. Presumably it will fail the same way it is for you guys, but at least I’ll have something to test against since mine are working just fine. I don’t have a failed test case … I promise not to sell your information.

squidsmarks

I think we sold our information the moment we signed up to Facebook. Happy to send you the link and see what happens.

KirAsh4

I have Robby’s at the moment, trying to recreate the problem.

KirAsh4

Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to debug from the command line … as always …

Looks like Facebook is returning an ‘unsupported browser’ page when we try to fetch the data. Well aren’t they clever. Time to do some code massaging …

KirAsh4

So here’s the fun part … mine was working. Because I hadn’t gone a 'git pull' in a while on my dev tree, so I never saw the change. Now that I am current, it’s not working. So, none of you are any more crazy than we all are, it really isn’t working. I’m running some debugging and trying to figure out where and why it’s failing.

robbythedude

@KirAsh4 said in Calendar Module - Unable to load Facebook Birthdays:

So here’s the fun part … mine was working. Because I hadn’t gone a 'git pull' in a while on my dev tree, so I never saw the change. Now that I am current, it’s not working. So, none of you are any more crazy than we all are, it really isn’t working. I’m running some debugging and trying to figure out where and why it’s failing.

We’ll have to recruit more QA peeps for future commits! :P haha

KirAsh4

Yeah, not as easy as it sounds. For those who enjoy seeing the nitty gritty, this is what happens with the various calendar payloads and you can clearly see the FB one failing:

Working on trying to figure out why since it does work from the command line, but not in browser.

robbythedude

@KirAsh4 said in Calendar Module - Unable to load Facebook Birthdays:

Yeah, not as easy as it sounds. For those who enjoy seeing the nitty gritty, this is what happens with the various calendar payloads and you can clearly see the FB one failing:

Working on trying to figure out why since it does work from the command line, but not in browser.

What is the tool you’re using in that screenshot to test this out?

KirAsh4

Firebug extension in Firefox. Though most browsers have a basic console output if you just hit F12. And the data that you see there is normally not visible. I added those output streams in my dev tree so I can see what’s going on.

KirAsh4

Ok, I need some testers … this is working for me with a small change in our fetcher code. So, for those willing to try, please following these steps:

Step 1
Navigate to the 'MagicMirror/modules/default/calendar/' folder

Step 2
Open the 'calendarfetcher.js' file in your favorite editor and look for the following line and delete it:

ical.fromURL(url, {}, function(err, data) {

Step 3
After deleting that line, in its place you’re going to paste in the following snippet of code:

    var opts = {
        headers: {
            'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Node.js 6.0.0) MagicMirror/2.0 (https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror)'
        }
    }
    ical.fromURL(url, opts, function(err, data) {

Please note that very last line, it’s almost identical to the one you deleted. Only one piece changed and you must put that line in as modified above!

Step 4
Save and close the file, and relaunch your MM process.

Step 5
Report back to me.

On my setup, it’s working. I’m getting this in my calendar now. (The names you see are birthdays, I simply have a filter to remove 's birthday' form the string that Facebook returns.)