421600 - local copy of remote calendar is corrupted if edited while server is inaccessible

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Calendar :: Provider: ICS/WebDAV, defect)

Description

[Andy Berkvam]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13pre) Gecko/20080305 Sunbird/0.8

If the network connection to the calendar server is disrupted (server outage, network problems, not connected to intranet, etc.) and a remote calendar is edited, all events in that calendar disappear.  The events do not reappear unless the calendar is completely deleted in Sunbird and a new calendar (with the same URL) is created.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Create a new iCalendar format calendar on the network (webcal://intranet/cal/MyTest.ics)
2. Check the (Cache (EXPERIMENTAL, requires restart) box in the calendar's properties.
3. Quit and restart Sunbird.
4. Create some events in the calendar.  Verify that they are saved on the server.
5. Disrupt the computer's network connection (to simulate the server becoming unreachable).
6. Add another event to the remote calendar.
7. Quit and restart Sunbird.  Notice that all contents of the remote calendar are now missing.
8. Quit Sunbird, re-enable network connection, restart Sunbird.  Contents are still missing.
9. Reload remote calendars.  Contents are still missing.
Actual Results:  
The remote calendar was completely unviewable in Sunbird.  It was still intact on the server.  The only way to get it to work again was to delete the calendar from Sunbird and then create it again with the same URL.  All the events were visible after recreating the calendar in Sunbird.

Expected Results:  
In rough order of preference...  Ideally, Sunbird would prompt that the server could not be reached and offer to move the new event to a local calendar (or to discard the edit).  Or it could just discard the edits.  Or it could add them and then discard them the next time it can contact the server.  Or all the contents could go missing but the calendar would be recovered when the server was available.  Basically, anything except permanently losing all of the calendar contents.

Comment 1

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

I haven't had time to actually confirm this, but in case it can be, this might block 0.8?

Comment 2

[Andy Berkvam]

Just out of curiosity I deleted my profile and followed the same steps in Sunbird 0.7 (minus the cache settings, of course) and got the same results.  The calendar disappears in the same way.

This has been a problem for us for quite some time. We have to rebuild calendars for our staff moderately often. But if 0.8 is going to advertise that it has offline support, this bug becomes a lot more significant than it's been in prior releases.

Comment 3

[Andreas Treumann]

I can only reproduce this issue with enabled caching (bug description). The scenario from Comment #2 works for me. 

Comment 4

[Daniel Boelzle [:dbo]]

Caching is still experimental, thus this does not block 0.8.

Comment 5

[Erik M]

Will this still be considered experimental in 0.9?

Comment 6

[Dhananjay]

Attachment: Receipts

Comment 7

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Caching is still considered experimental, especially since we don't have enough developers to work on this issue. If you are interested in helping out, please do contact me!

Comment 8

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Does this still happen with the latest 1.0b2pre nightlies?

Comment 9

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

No response for a while now, closing INCOMPLETE. Please reopen if you can reproduce or answer any unanswered questions.

Comment 10

[klus.sebastian]

Please reopen.
I just could confirm / experience the exact problem for Sunbird 1.0b1, without caching enabled.

I had to delete the remote calendar and configure it again. Reloading remote calendar did not work.

Comment 11

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Sunbird is discontinued, please re-test with Lightning 1.0b4(pre).