Floating Events Misinterpreted In IWC And Outlook Connector (Doc ID 1667075.1)

Last updated on MARCH 30, 2023

Applies to:

Symptoms

User seeing the same event at different times on different devices / different clients on same device.
Event was received by mail (coming from an exchange server. It used to be in timezone bound style but somehow the yet unknown client who put the info to the caldav server stripped the timezone so leaving a pure datetime string for dtstart/dtend (floating time).

Steps to reproduce:


I created two ics files with floating time information in summertime and wintertime to see different outcomes.
As Outlook connector imports the event with timezone information and since floating time is a requirement for the occurence of the bug, the event needs to be imported using iwc or similar means that preserve the semantics of the data.

* as some user login to iwc
* switch to calendar and import ics files, for the sake of this test these files are called 'Fake floating time webmail' and 'Fake floating time Winterzeit'
-> Import should succeed
* switch to 2013-08-07 check display of event 'Fake floating time webmail'
* depending on your timezone you will see it shifted by some hours.
-> Check your timezone setting and e.g. move to 'Russia' to see some differences.

* switch to 2013-11-07 and check display of event 'Fake floating time Winterzeit'
Please observe the time of that event and mark if it differs from the first event
-> It should be the same time as given in the ics files, no time arithmetics applied, e.g. 13hours local time, whatever it is.

Seen in Europe/Paris summertime (GMT+1+ 1 hour DST = GMT+2):
Event scheduled for 13h is displayed at 15h using iwc

Seen in Europe/Paris wintertime (GMT+1+ 0 hour DST = GMT+1):
Event scheduled for 13h is displayed at 14h using iwc

Hypothesis: Timezone offset is added to the floating time.


Outlook connector:

* Login to outlook account
* check given dates (2013-08-07, 2013-11-07)

Mark there is a difference between IWC and Outlook Connector.
Outlook + Outlook Connector seem to add the offset two times, that is

Europe/Paris summertime (GMT+1+ 1 hour DST = GMT+2):
Event scheduled for 13h is displayed at 17h, so 4 hours late = 2time the offset

Seen in Europe/Paris wintertime (GMT+1+ 0 hour DST = GMT+1):
Event scheduled for 13h is displayed at 14h, so 2 hours later

Changes

Cause

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