386989 - Dates are messed up when copying/moving multiple events from one calendar to another

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Kai Stukenbrock]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Sunbird 0.5

I want to move my birthdays (which are annually recurring events) to a seperate calendar.

If I search for all birthday and then select multiple birthdays from the list in the original calendar (which is an iCal file hosted on a webDAV server), copy or cut and then past them to the new calendar, the all birthday dates are messed up in perhaps 80% of all attempts, without a discernible pattern.

This happens regardless of whether the new calendar is local or on the net.

Interestingly, this does work when selecting single birthdays and pasting them, even when done a couple of times in a row.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select multiple birthdays from search list in calendar 1
2. Edit / Copy or Cut
3. Select calendar 2 in the calendar list
3. Edit / Paste
Actual Results:  
The birthdays end up in calendar 2, but the dates are all wrong.

Expected Results:  
Dates should be preserved.

Comment 1

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

Are the dates (after pasting) totally wrong, or do they differ just one day? Or is there some other logic to be found in the wrong dates?

Comment 2

[Kai Stukenbrock]

Actually, there seems to be a pattern: One of the birthday dates gets shifted to one of the other birthdays (i.e. person A now has the birthday of person B), while all other dates seem to get shifted by roughly the same amount (did not count exact days, but in one case all dates were shifted by about 4.5 months, in the other case by about 8.5 months).

Comment 3

[:Hb]

Did you keep in mind that Sunbird has an "active date"? 

The chronological first event will be placed on this date regardless of it's own original start date. All other events in the clipboard are placed relative to the active date. 

Selecting multiple events in the calendar views will move the active date. But selecting them  in the unifinder NOT move the active date. 

Please provide more information or close this bug.

Comment 4

[:Hb]

Bug 402841 deals with similar issues.

Comment 5

[:Hb]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Actually, there seems to be a pattern: One of the birthday dates gets shifted
> to one of the other birthdays (i.e. person A now has the birthday of person B),
> while all other dates seem to get shifted by roughly the same amount ...

This behaviour is correct from the view of current code. The first event in clipboard is pasted in to the selected day ("active date") and all other events follow with their relative distance.

But this behaviour is sometimes misleading, especially when copying or moving events between calendars. Evolution has the nice entries "Copy to [calendar list]" and "Move to [calendar list]" in the event context menu. 

Feel free to file a feature request about this.

Comment 6

[Markus]

24.5.0 Thunderbird Version
2.6.5 Lightning Version

6 years later. The problem still exists. 
It took me a lot of time to find out the bug and restore all the data that was messed up. I am glad to see that someone else has the same problem.

Lightning uses the simple words "Cut", "Copy" and "Paste". So one would expect, that no time is shifted within the selected calendar entries.
But people who have birthday in March now have birthday in October.

Please help to change this bug. 
If you think this behaviour is wanted, please add a message box for the users to understand when selecting more then one entry and copying or moving it.