Exceptions of recurring events do not show up in the events

[unforgiven]

I tried adding, using the web interface, a recurring event to Google
Calendar. Then, I deleted two occurrences of the event to create a
couple of exceptions. Exporting the calendar (again using the web
interface) I have seen that EXDATE clauses corresponding to the
occurrences I had deleted were present in the event within the
exported calendar. However, when fetching the event using the GData
Objective-C library, the exceptions were not available. I checked both
the event GDataRecurrence object and the event exceptions retrieved
using the recurrenceExceptions method. The recurrence does not include
any EXDATE clause. The array of exceptions returned by
recurrenceExceptions is nil. Is this a known bug or am I doing
something wrong? Thank you in advance.

[Greg Robbins]

You should inspect the http log to determine if the server is returning the expected data in the response XML.

[unforgiven]

How do I enable HTTP logging ? Once enabled, is the server output
logged to a file or to the console ?

[Greg Robbins]

The http logging feature is described at

http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/wiki/GDataObjCIntroduction#Logging_http_server_traffic

[unforgiven]

Ok, I have fetched again the event, with HTTP logging enabled. The log
confirms that the server is not sending back EXDATE clauses in the
gd:recurrence XML node.
The information about exceptions is returned, but not trough a
gd:recurrenceException XML node as shown in

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/elements.html#gdRecurrenceException

Instead, I simply see an entry XML node containing all of the
information related to the exceptions. I was expecting the following
nesting:

gd:recurrenceException
gd:entryLink
entry

This is probably the reason why the array of exceptions returned by
recurrenceExceptions is nil. Is this a recent modification of the
protocol ?

I am not posting the log, to avoid manually editing it to remove
relevant information. Let me know if you really need it (and in this
case I will edit and send it).

On Nov 16, 8:35 pm, Greg Robbins <grobb...@google.com> wrote:
> The http logging feature is described at
>

> http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/wiki/GDataObjCIntrod...

[Greg Robbins]

Questions about changes to the protocol should be directed to the Google Calendar API forum.

http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/community/forum.html

[unforgiven]

I understand.

If the protocol actually did change, will you support this changes in
the XML APIs as well?
Or should I immediately switch to the new JSON based APIs instead and
consider the current APIs as unsupported from now on ?
Please let me know what to do about.

Thank you in advance.

[Greg Robbins]

For Google APIs which have moved from XML to JSON, the XML versions are considered deprecated, so only major bugs will be fixed in the servers or in the client libraries.

[unforgiven]

Ok, my next question is: will this problem with retrieving and adding
exceptions to recurring event be considered a major bug and the XML
client library updated to solve it ?
Otherwise, I can not delay adopting the new APIs (hoping this works in
the new JSON based APIs), since right now it is not possible to
correctly sync recurring events.

Thank you.

[Greg Robbins]

Many Calendar API clients have been released over the past 5 years using the XML API, so I would be quite surprised if there have been any substantial bugs or changes introduced recently. The developers of those clients would certainly be complaining about the changes on the appropriate Calendar API discussion forum.

Still, with the new JSON API available for Calendar, I do not think it is prudent to release a new product using the older, now-deprecated XML API.