Calendar Module Error with Many Google Calendars

[sdetweil]

@moorevineyard 2 minute fetch is too frequent

it might not be enough time to get and parse

and DO you NEED to see the event you JUST added to the cal someplace else on the screen. when is the event? tomorrow, next week? not 2 minutes from now

[moorevineyard]

@sdetweil

I definitely agree that 2 minutes is too short for normal operations.

In my examples above, I was setting low times for troubleshooting purposes. I’m expecting to set the fetchInterval to about 24 hours once everything is set up the way I want. But this bug still causes lots of problems.

In particular:

For a new user that is frequently changing settings and styles, every change would require waiting a significant period of time before being able to check if it is acceptable. In my case, it means waiting a full day to see any calendar events again if I want to change the colors of one calendar.

Over time, events or calendars may be added by mistake. As far as I know, the normal way to refresh everything is to restart MagicMirror. Again, in this case, removing something that I do t want displayed means that I can’t see other events for a full day.

Is there another method of refreshing calendar data that would be less disruptive?

[sdetweil]

@moorevineyard you can set the fetch interval by url too

[moorevineyard]

I did some more testing and it appears that there may be some sort of rate limit with Google. I haven’t been able to find anything published, but slowing down the fetch process seems to fix the problem.

I’m not super great with JavaScript and don’t know anything about NodeJS, but this is what I did. In the calendar.js file, starting in line 121 and then down around line 158 I changed the following:

                this.config.calendars.forEach((calendar, index) => {  // added index
                        calendar.url = calendar.url.replace("webcal://", "http://");

                        const calendarConfig = {
                                maximumEntries: calendar.maximumEntries,
                                maximumNumberOfDays: calendar.maximumNumberOfDays,
                                pastDaysCount: calendar.pastDaysCount,
                                broadcastPastEvents: calendar.broadcastPastEvents,
                                selfSignedCert: calendar.selfSignedCert,
                                excludedEvents: calendar.excludedEvents,
                                fetchInterval: calendar.fetchInterval
                        };

                        if (typeof calendar.symbolClass === "undefined" || calendar.symbolClass === null) {
                                calendarConfig.symbolClass = "";
                        }
                        if (typeof calendar.titleClass === "undefined" || calendar.titleClass === null) {
                                calendarConfig.titleClass = "";
                        }
                        if (typeof calendar.timeClass === "undefined" || calendar.timeClass === null) {
                                calendarConfig.timeClass = "";
                        }

                        // we check user and password here for backwards compatibility with old configs
                        if (calendar.user && calendar.pass) {
                                Log.warn("Deprecation warning: Please update your calendar authentication configuration.");
                                Log.warn("https://docs.magicmirror.builders/modules/calendar.html#configuration-options");
                                calendar.auth = {
                                        user: calendar.user,
                                        pass: calendar.pass
                                };
                        }

                        /*
                         * tell helper to start a fetcher for this calendar
                         * fetcher till cycle
                         */
setTimeout(() => {             // added
                        this.addCalendar(calendar.url, calendar.auth, calendarConfig);
}, index * 5000);  // 5-second delay for each calendar
                });

This appears to add a 5 second delay to each of the fetches (one fetch occurs every 5 seconds during startup). I added a couple random calendars and now up to 11 seems to work without a problem.

Is it worth adding a configuration option to introduce the delay? Is Github the best place to make these kinds of suggestions?

[sdetweil]

@moorevineyard yes, github

you could create a pull request with the code solution
maybe just do it if the count is over 4 ?

11*5 = 55 seconds, almost a minute before some calendars display. Some would not like any delay