[SOLVED] .ics File Import Went Bad...:-<

[r8escjohn]

Have 5.0.6_GA_2313 OSS
Importing an .ics file in from a users calender from his current calendar application. Did last month's data ok (about 70 or so events) (on 5.0.1 OSS at that time....) with out any issues. Today I imported the next three months of data (about 200 or so events) using the same method and now have 5 copies of every event that I just imported in his calendar. :-<
Only difference is now I am on Zimbra 5.0.6 OSS - if that makes any change. Question is how can I easily go in an clean out this users calendar with out using the Web Interface and selecting each duplicate item and deleting (which I am doing now)? Looking through the .ics file I imported I do not see any dups of events. Any ideas out there?

[alexkelly]

Do you want to delete everything in the calendar? It is a little unclear if you want to remove and re-import or if you are trying to just remove duplicates. If you want to remove everything and re-import you can do it from the commandline with:

su - zimbra
zmmailbox -z -m account@domain.com ef /Calendar

.

the "ef" will empty folder, which you cannot do to the Calendar under the web client.

If you have the .ics file stored on the mailbox server, you can re-import it from the zmmailbox command with the PutRestUrl command

zmmailbox -z -m account@domain.com pru /Calendar /tmp/calendar.ics

[r8escjohn]

I kinda wish I could remove it all...That would make things soooooo much easier, however this user has put a *ton* of new appointments in even since I did the one month migration/.ics file import a while back, which worked. At this point I am just looking for an easy way to remove the 200 x5 or so dups.
Thanks for the responce!

[alexkelly]

That does make it a lot more difficult. I don't have any real answer on how to do that, but I would probably start with getting the .ics file from zimbra, and figuring out some shell/PERL script to parse through the .ics and remove things that are the same. Though it is entirely possible that there is some small difference between each entry that would make that step more difficult too.

From my previous example, you can get the ics of the user from the command line by doing:

zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com gru -o /tmp/calendar.ics /Calendar

That will get the .ics of the user, and you can work on it from there...but of course, getting the ICS is easy, cleaning it up is certainly the hard part.

[r8escjohn]

Alexkelly,
Many thanks for the command line syntax!
Using those was able to export existing, reimport origional .ics exports without any issues.:-> My suggestion to others is if you have a large amount of Calendar items to import from a .ics file, use the command line instead of the Web Interface-world of differance in speed and results. On the existing items I was able to use my friend grep then ->copy->paste->re-import <plus a bit of time> without any issues also.:-> Issue solved!