Google Calendar recurring event "event started" trigger

(Aj Loreto) #1

Hello,

Playing around with google calendar event started trigger and noticed that for recurring events, only the first event was triggered, succeeding events were not.

Settings, event is 3x a week, expected 3 triggers nut only triggered on the first one.

(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi Aj,

This is a known issue for the Google Calendar service. From the support documentation:

Known Issues
The ‘New Event’ trigger won’t work for recurring / repeated tasks, only for individual tasks. If you’d like to trigger on recurring / repeated tasks, you can use the ‘Event Started’ trigger to trigger when each individual event starts.

Thanks,
Dan

(Aj Loreto) #3

Hi Daniel,

I am using "event started which by that statement should be working . Is my
understanding incorrect?

(Daniel Beckett) #4

Hi Aj,

You’re right, sorry. Overlooked that :thinking:

I’m actually seeing the same thing in a quick test I’ve carried out so it’s possible that there’s a problem with the event started trigger for recurring events. I’m going to do some more testing and will hopefully have a more thorough answer for you soon.

Thanks,
Dan

(Daniel Beckett) #5

Hi again Aj,

There’s definitely some kind of bug with the event started trigger not working with recurring events. Apologies for the inconvenience. I’ve raised this with our development team for them to investigate.

Thanks,
Dan

(Aj Loreto) #6

Hi Dan,

Thanks. When will this issue be fixed? Will there be announcements on the
fixed issues? thanks.

(Daniel Beckett) #7

Hi Aj,

Sorry for the delayed response. There’s some big projects being worked on by the development team at the moment so unfortunately it looks like they won’t have an opportunity to look into this bug just yet.

The support documentation has been updated to reflect this.

For updates the best place to watch is the Flow XO Roadmap.

Thanks,
Dan

(Ian Houser) #8

If anyone is curious, I found a hacky way to get around this. It seems like IFTTT can handle recurring events properly, so I use that to fire a POST webhook to FlowXO with the following JSON body:

{"event_name":"{{Title}}", "event_description":"{{Description}}", "event_location":"{{Where}}", "event_starts":"{{Starts}}", "event_ends":"{{Ends}}", "event_url":"{{EventUrl}}"}

Then you can use those attributes containing Google Calendar even details in FlowXO like normal.

This method has it’s issues- it’ll take some time to fire depending on when IFTTT catches the event, and error handling is practically non-existent.

At least my recurring notifications can get sent now!

1 Like
(Daniel Beckett) #9

Interesting solution @ianhouser!

Thanks for sharing. :slight_smile: