Open Bug 451380 Opened 16 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Events from accepted invitations cannot be edited or updated locally

Categories

(Calendar :: E-mail based Scheduling (iTIP/iMIP), defect)

Lightning 0.9
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: maesculapius, Unassigned)

References

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16, Lightning 0.9pre 2008081719

When someone sends me an invite, I can choose to accept it, deny it or keep it tentative, but I'm not allowed to edit it. While I can understand the symbolic need for this, one needs to be able to control his/her own agenda! If someone who sent me an invite calls me to change some details, I simply wouldn't be able to process those, or add extra comments or something like that. That isn't quite useful :(

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Let someone send you an invite to an event
2. Accept it to put it in your calendar
3. Double-click / edit it and try to change eg. the start time or location.
Actual Results:  
Only your attendance can be editted, no other details.

Expected Results:  
I'd like to get some kind of warning that you are going to edit a shared / invited event, but still want to be able to edit it. It's MY agenda for god sake :)
It would be nice to be able to add notes to the Description field, but I suppose that could be complicated if the organizer sends you an updated version of the invitation.  Does the updated invitation overwrite the things you changed?  (Ditto for the start/stop times and such.)
+1 if it's possible.

Other things that we could change (perhaps easier to implement):

calendar (oops, I added the event to the wrong calendar)
category
privacy
priority
"show time as free or busy"
How about Pete's suggestions? Not being able to set a category or free/busy info is kinda useless. As long as the users is warned about what he is doing, I think it should be the user's choice at the end... Eg. When invites come from outlook, the description field is garbage - it would be nice to clear that and put some usefull info in it. Then, if new updated info enters your mailbox, you should just be given a warning ("Warning, you have made customizations to this event. Upon updating, those will be lost. Do you want to continue to update this event?").
Flags: wanted-calendar0.9+
Please leave setting flags to release drivers, if you would like to request something please use the "?" setting.
Flags: wanted-calendar0.9+
Flags: wanted-calendar0.9?
Excuse my ignorance...
Right, Pete. Once the organizer reschedules/updates the event, your changes would be lost. We would need a separate storage to keep user local changes to such events and merge those. But IMO it's hard to judge what is preferred. One might argue that a description change made by the organizer is required to show up resp. might be important.
Flags: wanted-calendar0.9? → wanted-calendar0.9-
OS: Windows XP → All
Hardware: PC → All
Summary: Not able to edit invites → Events from accepted invitations cannot be edited or updated locally
Version: unspecified → Lightning 0.9
There is another reason, why I would like the possibility to edit invitations: I get invitations, that contains words with german vowles (ä,ö,ü). This words a unreadable (f.e.: Büro = B&Uumlo)
I have two main reasons to be able to edit accepted events:

1. Update invites from Outlook users at my work tend to outnumber new event invites by at least 3:1, and Outlook always prefixes the titles with the relatively useless "Updated:" prefix. So I end up with lots of events on the monthly view that I most often use for planning that all have the same visible title "Updated:". (Eventually, my calender begins makes about as much sense as "First name: Not", "Last name: sure" in Idiocracy!).

2. About 3/4ths of the updates are about reschedules concern recurring weekly or bi-weekly meetings to change the time or location only for that day. Lightning doesn't yet seem to handle this one-instance changes (as already reported in another bug), and doesn't let me edit that instance to change the time/location manually either.

IMHO, the user should always be able to privately correct the title, date and location fields, if not other parts - what if the updated information was received by phone from someone on the road without access to a VPN-enabled texting device (read work laptop)?  Since I use the calendar more for my own activity planning and scheduling, and not for proving who sent what invite message, this edit-disable for accepted events to me appears overkill...
(In reply to comment #9)
> 2. About 3/4ths of the updates are about reschedules concern recurring weekly
> or bi-weekly meetings to change the time or location only for that day.
> Lightning doesn't yet seem to handle this one-instance changes (as already
> reported in another bug), and doesn't let me edit that instance to change the
> time/location manually either.

> IMHO, the user should always be able to privately correct the title, date and
> location fields, if not other parts - what if the updated information was
> received by phone from someone on the road without access to a VPN-enabled
> texting device (read work laptop)?  Since I use the calendar more for my own
> activity planning and scheduling, and not for proving who sent what invite
> message, this edit-disable for accepted events to me appears overkill...
Then he could add his own event and has to track it by himself.

I am yet not convinced about being too liberal here unless we have some kind of merging algorithm. I agree stuff like categories or alarms are presumably user local. Confirming to allow setting categor(ies).
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Flags: wanted-calendar0.9-
Rather than a merge algorithm, why not just create a separate description/notes field?  (If necessary, they can be stored in the same field in the ICS, with a delimiter.  Upon update, the delimited section could be retained.)

I know that editing the description is pretty important to me.   I deal with a lot of teleconferences, and being able to add my own agenda/notes/talking points to the meeting when I'm not the sender would be invaluable.

Categories and Alarms, I think everyone is in agreement on.  Those are an absolute requirement.  Also, the things mentioned in comment #1.
(In reply to comment #10)
> Then he could add his own event and has to track it by himself.
> 
> I am yet not convinced about being too liberal here unless we have some kind of
> merging algorithm. I agree stuff like categories or alarms are presumably user
> local. Confirming to allow setting categor(ies).
The issue of whether this is too liberal or not sounds to me as a bit premature and  presumptuous, since the reason for asking this in the first place is that Lightning is not yet able to handle a large fraction of the "real world" invite updates.

The complementary problem that's making this crucial to me is that it won't even allow copy and paste as a new event that I could track on my own. Often people send long agendas or livemeeting details with the invites, and manually creating own events and cutting and pasting multiple individual fields one by one is prohibitive enough to force a return to Outlook (shudder!). (Plus there's no way to add the CC list in own "tracking copy events" unless they get sent...)
While a seperate description field would be one solution, I don't think it would be the most logical one. Fact is; invites are being sent a lot, and handling them in a dynamic and intuitive way seems quite important to me - should you want Thunderbird / Lightning to be considered an alternative to clients like Outlook. The situations described above are not theoretical but based on real-life everyday experience. Not being able to change details on an event makes the whole event useless.

Then, should we all just stop sending invites because we can't get out of it what we need? Don't think so - for as long as a decent solution isn't going to be thought of (at least, I understand that is quite "the" problem), wouldn't it be easy to at least make it intuitive and usable to the user? For example by supplying the possibility to the user... like

- double click a sent invitation-event.
- try to edit a special field (eg. the time - field marked somehow)
- note the change of the field and throw an alert
- inform the user that a shared event is being editted and going on with editing would make it a private event
- if the user disagrees, change nothing
- if the user agrees, just copy the event to a new one (private) with the made changes and delete the invitation-event.

That sounds like a fair deal to me - giving users the possibility without hacking too much in native invitation-code.

Any thoughts on that?
(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > 2. About 3/4ths of the updates are about reschedules concern recurring weekly
> > or bi-weekly meetings to change the time or location only for that day.
> > Lightning doesn't yet seem to handle this one-instance changes (as already
> > reported in another bug), and doesn't let me edit that instance to change
I forgot to comment that this ought to be fixed already by bug 457203 and bug 392465.

(In reply to comment #12)
> even allow copy and paste as a new event that I could track on my own. Often
> people send long agendas or livemeeting details with the invites, and manually
> creating own events and cutting and pasting multiple individual fields one by
> one is prohibitive enough to force a return to Outlook (shudder!). (Plus
> there's no way to add the CC list in own "tracking copy events" unless they get
> sent...)
I buy that, the description is definitely missing.

(In reply to comment #13)
> - inform the user that a shared event is being editted and going on with
> editing would make it a private event
In general I think this is an excellent idea. Alternatively, we may consider to warn that local changes will get lost when accepting an event update (issued by the organizer).
Flags: wanted-calendar1.0+
I think there is a difference between changes that are, or may be, personal to the recipient of the invite - categories, descriptions or notes - perhaps an alternative to duplicate as a local task so that changes can be made and tracked.

I agree that some of the changes might be general to the group and it would be very helpful to have a way to generate them from the invite.

I know the categories issues seems to be agreed, but I want to urge a quick implementation.  I use my lightning entries as the spring board for my time tracking, record keeping and contract completion.
How does Outlook/Exchange handle this scenario? Maybe it makes sense for Lightning to mimic that, maybe not.
Is this bug tracking the setting of alarms on invited events?  On a test event sent via Mac Lightning 1.0b1 via a Zimbra server (to Lightning nightly and 1.0b1 recipients), the invited alarm was lost, and invitees do not appear to be able to add or alter their own alarm.
An update to my own comment: It appears that events to the designated Calendar recipient allow update of event status and reminder times, but events sent to distribution lists or account aliases do not.  Filing a separate bug for that issue, but still interest in this one.
Note that Zimbra itself does seem to allow local edits: it warns that your changes will only be local, and they will be overwritten if the owner makes changes, but you can indeed make those local changes.
Hi, I submitted a patch for the issue of editing the category of received in events as desired by bug #920285. If the patch gets accepted, then the category of received events can locally be assigned / edited. I find that usefull for coloring the events in the calendar (which can be archived by installing the Calendar Tweaks plugin).
Severity: normal → S3
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.