Reverse Sync From iCal?

[LJTG]

I see that I can sync my Time Entries with my iCal (time entries that I have input in my Time Master app can show up on my iCal) - is it possible to have the reverse? i.e. any entry I put into my iCal automatically show up in Time Master?  I keep track of my appointments with clients through iCal, then in order to invoice them I have to manually enter these same appointments into time entries on my Time Master app.  I feel like there has to be a better way?

Thank you!

[Mark]

Although I haven't tried this, would it work for you if you changed the way you've been doing things and instead enter the appt direct into Time Master?
In theory that would then appear in your calendar and be waiting for you to invoice.

[Mark]

You can ignore my last comment. Now that I've had a look I see that the sync only occurs for entries up till today and not advance entries so my theory wouldn't work.

Meanwhile though, whilst testing this I found the sync to be inconsistent. I would check the calendar and sometimes my entries would appear and other times not. What's more, I might open the calendar be looking at an entry created by Time Master and it would disappear while I was looking at it. I realised I initially had the sync turned off and I'm thinking this is probably why.

Can anyone explain this to me please? I probably don't really need it but I do like it when stuff just works together. 

[Adam]

LJTG, the Sync can only "publish" to the Calendar app, the reverse is not possible.

Kaz, I don't know if you are using more than one device, but if you are make sure that you are only doing the Sync to Cal with *one* device.  If you had the Sync on, it would have published those events and if you turned it off, it would not remove those, so they would stay out there.  The other issue is that TM will delete things older than the "Sync Period".  We do this because it would take too long to try and sync years of events and would start to fail the sync process.  It also depends if you have the Sync on Startup checked as to whether it will try and sync all the events when you first launch TM or if it just blindly publishes.

[Mark]

Thanks Adam.

It is only one device.
As I was only testing its most likely it was the deleting of entries outside of the sync period.

I understand having a limit on the sync period. I don't want to sit there all day waiting for the sync to finish. That said I would expect publishing and deleting would only occur for entries within that period.  If I removed an entry from Time Master older than the sync period I'd have no expectation for it to be removed from my Cal. I would however expect that any entries I've added to the Cal to remain there unless I deliberately remove them.

Otherwise I'm not sure what reason you would have for syncing. You can't publish future events to remind yourself they're happening and anything that has happened will only remain visible for a specified period. If I was using the sync I'd be doing so that I can more easily check when I was at specific clients for example and I might want to check three weeks ago or six months ago.

I don't mean to sound negative, I get a little excited when I hear of features I didn't realise or had forgotten existed and then I start trying to think of ways I might benefit from them. I feel like I might be missing the point on this one.

[Adam]

If you have "Sync at Startup" *unchecked* it will not remove old events.  It will only *modify* any calendar event if you modify it's Time Entry within the window period.

Time Master was never meant to be psychic.  We never intended for it to know how much time you would spend on an event in the future.     The calendar does not sync into the future for the same reason that it doesn't sync into the distant past.

The main reason for syncing to the calendar is that it is a nice way to see what you did during the day.  On the iPhone if you rotate the calendar, you can see a graphic view and it makes it easy to spot if you missed any time during the day that should have been billed.  This is useful for people who deal with many different clients, projects and/or tasks during the day.

I will have to look to see if you have the Sync at Startup off and you create a "future" event, how it publishes (or not) to the calendar right now.

[Mark]

Ok. I thought the purpose of sync at startup was so I didn't need to manually tell the app to sync.

Didn't realise it added the delete functionality and without it the app would publish anyway as long as the sync was turned on.

  Wow would you look at that! When you turn the iphone on its side the calendar changes to a graphic view. That is nice! 

[Mark]

Oh oh.

Our discussion got me to test it again.
I went to iCal and selected a day within the sync window that I know there is a time entry for. Nothing there.
I then went into TM, went to settings, made sure 'Sync with Calendar' is on and 'Sync on Startup' is unchecked. If I do nothing else and go back into the calendar, nothing appears on that day.
If I go into TM and press 'Sync Now', then go back to calendar, the entry is there but as the calendar refreshes, the entry gets deleted even though its within the sync period.

Whilst typing this I started to think that maybe sync with calendar needs to be on when the entry is originally created for it to stay, so I added another entry for the same day, synced, went to the calendar and both were there but both were also deleted upon the refresh. The sync period is 120 days and the entries are for about 50 days ago.