Duplicated sync'd appointments

[Guest chucky.egg]

This is an odd one

I have a script which deletes/re-inserts appointments in my Calendar, based on information from our Helpdesk system. Each time it runs all the previous appointments in that Category are deleted, and new ones created.

The script works fine, and the appointments in my Outlook calendar appear correctly, and only once.

ActiveSync says it's sync'd successfully.

But on my device each of these auto generated appointments get duplicated. Two entries appear in my device calendar, and two are shown in Spb Diary.

Anyone else had duplicate appointments?

[Guest fraser]

I've had all sorts of duplicate hastles over the years. Newer versions of Outlook seem to have less problems, and there are also a couple of tools to help you remove them. I think problems are mostly due to syncing to two different PCs.

What is different from your case is that Outlook would also show the duplicates. What you have there is very strange.

[Guest chucky.egg]

Yeah, strange indeed

I think that it might be due to the time it takes to sync - I've got a new laptop which is incredibly slooooooow, and AS4.1 is slower than 3.8 IMO

The updates are based on database records, and for some it will create 2 appts for each record. I had 35 records, so that's a potential 70 appts, plus deletion of the previous 70 records = 140 changes every 15 minutes.

I've cut out some of the automatic appts and that seems to have helped, but it still does it 1 in ever 3-4 syncs

[Guest fraser]

When it happens, do you get all sync'd appointments duplicated, or just some? And, would it happen to some manually created appointments in Outlook, or just the ones from the support system? I don't think the phone or maybe even ActiveSync is at ffault here, it may be the generation on the appointments. Perhaps some hidden ID/GUID field or something isn't being set up right?

One last thought...are they dupes or possibly just ones that didn't get deleted at the start? You could check by editing one, resync, then check the duplicate edited one. If you can see your change, the delete is borked, explaining the extra copies.

[Guest chucky.egg]

Er, hmmm

It only happens to the appointments that are auto generated. "Regular" appts are fine.

These appts are all in a Category called "Auto_Helpdesk", and the script deletes all appts in this Category before it creates the new ones. If they were ones that weren't deleted by the script then they would show up in Outlook too.

[Guest fraser]

Odd. All I can suggest doing is finding a way to view the raw properties of each of the items, trying to find out if there is anything odd in one of the fields.

You could also manually create some appointments in the "Auto_Helpdesk" category, to see if the problem lies in a) the creation of the objects, or ;) the syncing.

Also, add some logging to your script, perhaps noting every new item it creates. That'll show you what it's actually doing. Perhaps ActiveSync has some extra logging that can be enabled as well.

[Guest chucky.egg]

Hmm

I've just Hard Reset because reminders were not going off.

I've not reinstalled much (Resco Explorer, Spb PocketPlus, Spb Diary, CodeWallet) and it's already doing the same thing.

I suspect Spb Diary now.