177279 - Alarms don't fire under certain (very common) conditions

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Sunbird Only, defect)

Description

[Peter Lairo]

Mozilla Calendar 2002102816-cal
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021028

Alarms don't fire under certain (very common) conditions

What does work (alarms fire as expected):
-----------------------------------------
1. Create an alarm and reload cal/moz *before* alarm is due to fire.
2. Create an alarm and wait for it to fire (don't reload Calendar)

What doesn't work (alarms don't fire as expected):
--------------------------------------------------
3. Reload calendar after alarm would have fired & before event starts
4. Reload calendar after alarm would have fired & after event started

This is a very serious bug because szenarios 3 & 4 are highly common (e.g.,
create event 2 weeks from now and have alarm fire 2 days before event. If alarm
should fall on a weekend, or on a day or hour before user turns on his PC, he
will never be reminded).

This serious bug makes it impossible for me to use/test Calendar. I therefore
request/suggest to make this bug "Priority = P1".

PS. Creating a new event causes all alarms affected by this bug to suddenly fire.

PPS. I suspect (but cannot test) that this bug is Platform:All, OS:All.

Comment 1

[Mike Potter]

Confirmed and accepting. 
Some preferences here would do us a lot of good.

Comment 2

[Peter Lairo]

I'm not sure preferences are needed here. Users will likely always want to be
reminded (hear an alarm) of *all* events they had set an alarm for, especially
those that had been "missed" (a morbid obsession with what went wrong?).

Anyone: is this "OS=All"?

Comment 3

[Mike Potter]

I don't want to be reminded of events that have gone by.
I'll add a preference for this, something like:
X Show missed alarms for past events
X Show missed alarms for future events

Platform doens't really mean anything for Calendar now, but I'll mark this as
All. Reducing severity to normal.

Comment 4

[Mike Potter]

-> Mostafa who will modify the backend code.

Comment 5

[Peter Lairo]

Mostafa, any chance og getting this fixed? A calendar without reliable alarms is
useless to me - and i am *aching* to use calendar.

Comment 6

[Mostafa Hosseini]

I fixed the backend: addobserver() was being called after setserver() in which
expired alarms go off. Switching the order fixed the problem in the backend. The
frontend still needs a tweak though: In
CalendarAlarmObserver.prototype.fireAlarm, the calendar window is still
undefined when these alarms go off, causing the function to return with no action.

Comment 7

[Mike Potter]

Accepted and getting closer...

Comment 8

[Jase Roberts]

I'd agree with the orignial poster that this is a really serious issue.  Just
this morning I had an 8am event scheduled and got logged in to my computer at
7:55.  No alarm came up because the alarm was set to go off 15 mins before the
event.  That's definitely not the behaviour I'd expect.

Mike suggested that he didn't want to see missed alarms.  I can understand that
(especially in a case of a machine that's infrequently used), but I think seeing
them should be the default with a pref to override.

I actually suspect (but can't immediatly confirm) that there are other cases
where my alarms are not going off.  I feel like I'm only getting about 1/2 of
them in a timely manner.  At other times I don't see anything until I switch to
calendar and take some action -- then a bunch pop up at once.

Comment 9

[Robert Martin]

This bug is extremely annoying. It makes complete sense to have an alarm go off
for an event that has already passed in time. Outlook handles this properly. I
had a reoccuring task in Outlook that had a reminder for me to fill out my time
log at work at 9:00 every Monday. If I happened to login to my machine after
that time, I still got the reminder - regardless if it was 9:05 that Monday or
even days later if I had been out on business. Just because the event has passed
in time doesn't mean that the alarm should not go off.

Comment 10

[Aleksander Adamowski]

I'd like to support comment #8 and #9.

The default setting should be to show overdue alarms for at least two reasons:

1) People are expecting this behaviour based on experience with other PIM
software (Outlook, Lotus Notes, many other)
2) Missing a reminder about an important meeting when you login to your notebook
only 5 minutes after {meeting_time - 30 minutes} will likely result in severe
business impact.

Comment 11

[Mike Coppins]

*** Bug 200101 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Mike Coppins]

Is it possible to integrate the checking of calendar events so that if events
are due for a reminder, any mozilla component can be running and the reminder be
triggered?  Like for example with Mailnews, if automatic mail checkingchecking
is set, then the mailnews icon in the bottom left corner of the mozilla
component window changes accordingly.  I realise this may constitute a feature
addition request, and much further down the development line, but I thought I'd
throw the topic in to find out what the likeliness of it was.

Comment 13

[Peter Lairo]

That's bug 134969

Comment 14

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Attachment: Patch to fire pending alarms

The functionality is there, it just needs to be used properly. Adding patch to
fire pending alarms. If this makes it in the next step would be to provide the
preferences.

Comment 15

[Mike Potter]

Comment on attachment 125910 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch to fire pending alarms

Approved.

Comment 16

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Patch http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=125910&action=view checked
into cvs.

Comment 17

[Mostafa Hosseini]

The following checkin:
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsquery.cgi?treeid=default&module=CalendarClient&branch=HEAD&branchtype=match&dir=&file=&filetype=match&who=&whotype=match&sortby=Date&hours=2&date=explicit&mindate=08%2F01%2F2003+11%3A00%3A00&maxdate=08%2F01%2F2003+12%3A00%3A00&cvsroot=%2Fcvsroot
adds the preference for showing/notshowing missed alarms; and with that, this
bug gets completely fixed.

Comment 18

[Peter Lairo]

(OT) WOOHOO! Calendar seems usable, at last! Thank you Mostafa! :-D

Comment 19

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

The bugspam monkeys have been set free and are feeding on Calendar :: Sunbird Only. Be afraid for your sanity!