Mailing List Archive

calendar (CALDAV) document growing over time ...
Hi folks,

I've been using the Lightning plugin in Mozilla Thunderbird (now built
in) as my primary calendar/task management client for years against
davical orunning on my Debian HTTP server, and I've gotten the
impression that the calendar (CALDAV) document retrieved via HTTP GET
seems to get bigger and bigger (to the point that eventually Thunderbird
can't load it and I've had to create a new calendar), but I've never
gone to the effort of investigating it until now.

I've retrieved the calendar document before making any changes, and then
after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100% completed or
dismissing one occurrence of a repeating event, so that I can compare
the documents to see the changes.

I found that after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100%
completed, the LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP, and X-MOZ-GENERATION attributes
are modified, and a new block starting with BEGIN:VTODO and ending with
END:VTODO and containing
RECURRENCE-ID;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210424T060000,
STATUS:COMPLETED, and COMPLETED:20210424T230000Z attributes is added. 
This resulted in the document growing by 610 bytes.  I tried the same
thing with a different recurring task and saw similar changes resulting
in the document growing by 597 bytes.

In contrast, I found that after dismissing a repeating event,  the
BEGIN:VEVENT ... END:VEVENT block for the event was moved slightly
towards the end of the document, the moved LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP,
X-MOZ-GENERATION, and X-MOZ-LASTACK attributes have been modified from
what they were originally, but the document is exactly the same size as
it was before the change.

I have several daily and multiple days per week tasks and mark each
occurrence as completed or cancelled after I see the alarm and complete
the task, so the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO block when an
occurrence of a repeating task is marked as 100% is causing the CALDAV
document to grow significantly every week

Is the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO block when an occurrence
of a repeating task is marked as 100% the normal behavior for CALDAV, or
is it a peculiarity of Mozilla Thunderbird?
Is this behavior a bug, either in davical or in Mozilla Thunderbird?
Is it possible to indicate the completion of a recurring task in a
fashion similar to how the completion of a recurring event is indicated,
so that it isn't necessary to add a new VTODO block and cause the
document to grow?

    thanks for your help,
    Peter



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Re: calendar (CALDAV) document growing over time ... [ In reply to ]
Is anyone able to answer some of my questions below?  Or alternatively,
is there a better place to ask these questions?

    thanks,
    Peter

On 5/12/2021 10:08 PM, yuj3w66a6f-at-liamekaens.com |davical-general| wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been using the Lightning plugin in Mozilla Thunderbird (now built
> in) as my primary calendar/task management client for years against
> davical orunning on my Debian HTTP server, and I've gotten the
> impression that the calendar (CALDAV) document retrieved via HTTP GET
> seems to get bigger and bigger (to the point that eventually
> Thunderbird can't load it and I've had to create a new calendar), but
> I've never gone to the effort of investigating it until now.
>
> I've retrieved the calendar document before making any changes, and
> then after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100%
> completed or dismissing one occurrence of a repeating event, so that I
> can compare the documents to see the changes.
>
> I found that after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100%
> completed, the LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP, and X-MOZ-GENERATION attributes
> are modified, and a new block starting with BEGIN:VTODO and ending
> with END:VTODO and containing
> RECURRENCE-ID;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210424T060000,
> STATUS:COMPLETED, and COMPLETED:20210424T230000Z attributes is added. 
> This resulted in the document growing by 610 bytes.  I tried the same
> thing with a different recurring task and saw similar changes
> resulting in the document growing by 597 bytes.
>
> In contrast, I found that after dismissing a repeating event,  the
> BEGIN:VEVENT ... END:VEVENT block for the event was moved slightly
> towards the end of the document, the moved LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP,
> X-MOZ-GENERATION, and X-MOZ-LASTACK attributes have been modified from
> what they were originally, but the document is exactly the same size
> as it was before the change.
>
> I have several daily and multiple days per week tasks and mark each
> occurrence as completed or cancelled after I see the alarm and
> complete the task, so the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO
> block when an occurrence of a repeating task is marked as 100% is
> causing the CALDAV document to grow significantly every week
>
> Is the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO block when an
> occurrence of a repeating task is marked as 100% the normal behavior
> for CALDAV, or is it a peculiarity of Mozilla Thunderbird?
> Is this behavior a bug, either in davical or in Mozilla Thunderbird?
> Is it possible to indicate the completion of a recurring task in a
> fashion similar to how the completion of a recurring event is
> indicated, so that it isn't necessary to add a new VTODO block and
> cause the document to grow?
>
>     thanks for your help,
>     Peter
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Davical-general mailing list
> Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general



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Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
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Re: calendar (CALDAV) document growing over time ... [ In reply to ]
Hi Peter,

from DAViCal's perspective, your calendar or to-do list is a document
received from the user agent, which is stored and returned completely or
in parts depending on search criteria, but not usually modified by the
server. So I think the changes you describe here are all created by
Thunderbird/Lightning and you should contact them if you think something
there is not working as it should.

However, from your description and my superficial reading of the
iCalendar spec at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545 I'd say
that while surprising at first sight, this behaviour is not necessarily
wrong: In the VTODO case, you're recording additional information every
day (today's todo is completed 75%, while yesterday's is still at 66%),
while for the VEVENT you're not changing the event at all, you're just
dismissing a notification that your calendar client felt would be
helpful to show. If you were to close and restart Thunderbird later on,
the todo would still show as 75% complete, while I think the event
notification would be gone and not come back until the next repetition.

In DAViCal, there's the global $c->hide_older_than config option, which
may help to hide VTODOs older than a certain number of days from
clients; the collection would still continue to be growing on the
server. I remember the admin of a commercial calendar system requesting
(weekly) repeating events not be scheduled indefinitely, but new
repeating events to be created every calendar year...

HTH,
Florian


On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 09:16:42PM -0700, yuj3w66a6f@liamekaens.com wrote:
> Is anyone able to answer some of my questions below?? Or alternatively, is
> there a better place to ask these questions?
>
> ??? thanks,
> ??? Peter
>
> On 5/12/2021 10:08 PM, yuj3w66a6f-at-liamekaens.com |davical-general| wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I've been using the Lightning plugin in Mozilla Thunderbird (now built
> > in) as my primary calendar/task management client for years against
> > davical orunning on my Debian HTTP server, and I've gotten the
> > impression that the calendar (CALDAV) document retrieved via HTTP GET
> > seems to get bigger and bigger (to the point that eventually Thunderbird
> > can't load it and I've had to create a new calendar), but I've never
> > gone to the effort of investigating it until now.
> >
> > I've retrieved the calendar document before making any changes, and then
> > after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100% completed or
> > dismissing one occurrence of a repeating event, so that I can compare
> > the documents to see the changes.
> >
> > I found that after marking one occurrence of a repeating task as 100%
> > completed, the LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP, and X-MOZ-GENERATION attributes
> > are modified, and a new block starting with BEGIN:VTODO and ending with
> > END:VTODO and containing
> > RECURRENCE-ID;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210424T060000,
> > STATUS:COMPLETED, and COMPLETED:20210424T230000Z attributes is added.?
> > This resulted in the document growing by 610 bytes.? I tried the same
> > thing with a different recurring task and saw similar changes resulting
> > in the document growing by 597 bytes.
> >
> > In contrast, I found that after dismissing a repeating event,? the
> > BEGIN:VEVENT ... END:VEVENT block for the event was moved slightly
> > towards the end of the document, the moved LAST-MODIFIED, DTSTAMP,
> > X-MOZ-GENERATION, and X-MOZ-LASTACK attributes have been modified from
> > what they were originally, but the document is exactly the same size as
> > it was before the change.
> >
> > I have several daily and multiple days per week tasks and mark each
> > occurrence as completed or cancelled after I see the alarm and complete
> > the task, so the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO block when an
> > occurrence of a repeating task is marked as 100% is causing the CALDAV
> > document to grow significantly every week
> >
> > Is the addition of a new BEGIN:VTODO/END:VTODO block when an occurrence
> > of a repeating task is marked as 100% the normal behavior for CALDAV, or
> > is it a peculiarity of Mozilla Thunderbird?
> > Is this behavior a bug, either in davical or in Mozilla Thunderbird?
> > Is it possible to indicate the completion of a recurring task in a
> > fashion similar to how the completion of a recurring event is indicated,
> > so that it isn't necessary to add a new VTODO block and cause the
> > document to grow?
> >
> > ??? thanks for your help,
> > ??? Peter
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Davical-general mailing list
> > Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Davical-general mailing list
> Davical-general@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/davical-general


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