[sync] ActiveSync, Tasks and DeadOccur

[Michael J Rubinsky]

Hi John,

I had some time to investigate further and implement the DEADOCCUR  
property in Horde.

It is used when a client is completing an occurrence of a recurring  
task. What happens is that it sends an ADD to the server for a new  
task that represents the completed task in the series - and this task  
has the DEADOCCUR property set. It then either replaces or edits the  
original series - making the recurrence start date the date of the  
next occurrence. For example, Outlook will perform an UPDATE on the  
original series, while the mobile client "Nine" performs an ADD/DELETE.

On the server when we receive the data we look for the DEADOCCUR  
property and if it's set, we do not add any of the recurrence  
properties to that task.  This has the side effect of each occurrence  
that was completed showing up as a separate completed task.

In the other direction, due to the way Horde stores and handles  
recurring tasks, we don't have to use the DEADOCCUR property. Horde  
doesn't currently track the history of completed tasks in a series  
other than noting that it was or was not completed. This means we  
can't send a separate, "dead" task to represent the completed  
occurrence. We simply bump the next due date in the series on the  
original task object. If the client has a way of showing the completed  
occurrences, this would prevent them occurrence that was completed on  
Horde's side from showing, but I don't have any clients that act this  
way.


All in all, Horde was acting correctly previous to this change, with  
the exception that if somebody were to complete an occurrence on an  
EAS client, then subsequently "uncomplete" it in Horde, this would  
create a new recurring series on the client. Using the DEADOCCUR  
property to know when not to add the recurrence data fixes this  
behavior.

Hope this helps.



Quoting John Bieling <john.bieling at gmx.de>:

> Thanks for you feedback, Michael. I will go with the boolean value,  
> but it will be trial-and-error I guess :-)
>
> John
>
>
> On 3/31/2018 9:07 PM, Michael J Rubinsky wrote:
>>
>> Quoting John Bieling <john.bieling at gmx.de>:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> has any of the horde EAS developers experience with the DeadOccur  
>>> tag of EAS for tasks? The Microsoft documentation is very thin and  
>>> I have not yet been able to understand, what this tag is doing and  
>>> what it is for.
>>
>> From what I understand, that tag is used as a flag to indicate that  
>> a Task object represents a specific occurrence of a recurring task,  
>> as opposed to the object representing/defining the entire series. I  
>> remember being somewhat confused as to how the value worked,  
>> however, as the documentation from MS is pretty weak. IIRC, I think  
>> it was Zpush, simply takes this tag as a boolean value.
>>
>>> Follow up question: Does horde support this feature? (So I could  
>>> test my EAS client against a horde server)
>>
>> Horde currently ignores this tag, however. Implementing this is on  
>> my ever growing list of todos once I find the time...
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for your help
>>> John
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
mike
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