Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
Good morning,
Yesterday I did a calendar import for my upcoming den meetings. I only selected my den calendar to add events to. For some reason, the COR and one random Den leader was included on all of my den meeting Invitees list. Is this a bug?
Also - when using “Add Invitees” via the Chrome extension, I used to be able to clean out RSVPs for scouts who are no longer in the pack. Attempting to do this to fix the above issue only added people and did not remove any. Is there a way to update Calendar invitees for Pack/Den calendars in bulk? i.e. not painfully go thru each appointment and click thru attendees to remove.
Thanks!
It appears the Scoutbook has changed who shows up in the Leaders dropdown box for Invitees when adding/editing an event. It looks like Scoutbook is now including all of the unit Admins in the list. Is suspect your random Den leader is also a unit Admin in your Pack.
When the Leaders cell is marked “on” in the csv file, the extension has to discover who the leaders are that are appropriate for that calendar event, in this case, a Den. It does that by using the same dropdown box content. Since Scoutbook added the Admins in the dropdown, the extension is including them as well.
I am not sure why Scoutbook added Admins, and will investigate. If there was a valid reason for doing so (and not a bug) then I may be able to modify the extension to examine the roster instead to find the leaders that should be associated with the Den.
Regarding Add Invitees:
I did not see an issue testing this. The way Scoutbook worked before (and in my test now) was that simply editing an event and saving it without touching the invitee list would automatically remove any members no longer on the Roster. Using Add Invitees and not changing or selecting anyone on the list should do the same thing. When presented with the list of Events, click Select All and do not touch any of the invitee lists. This will only remove those not approved or present on the roster.
Update with Import: @DonovanMcNeil suggested that the inclusion of unit Admins in the Leader Dropdown for Dens/Patrols is likely due to the need to have at least two registered leaders at each event. This is a valid reason. Note that all Key 3 are Unit Admins.
However, when importing, it makes it difficult to know “which” of the other Admins should be invited to meet the YPT constraint.
During the design of the import CSV file, fields were restricted to simple categories (e.g. include Scouts, Parents, Leaders) because of the logistical nightmare of attempting to include member information in the file. The inclusion of extra leaders is a compromise that impacts Dens and Patrols, along with the pre-existing compromise that events cannot be imported that only include a subset of members from the calendar unit/subunit selected.
One way that I have worked around the limitations that @GaryFeutz noted in his posts is to create one event including the people that “should” be coming to the event (in my case the application is OA chapter meeting reminders for my troop arrowmen), then duplicating the event using the “Copy event” feature from the extension. It’s somewhat more cumbersome than the CSV import, but has the advantage that the reminders and invitee lists copy exactly as I want them. The flip side is that I have to do manually it for every OA chapter meeting, plus every other OA event along the way.
I haven’t experimented with this, but what about this process:
Create events with no invitees (or whatever the default grouping is) using the CSV import.
Then, use the Add Invitees process to select the CSV-imported events and add/remove people to get the actually relevant folks on the invitee list.
It seems like that should work (at least from the outside). I’m a little confused by the issue you’re having with the Add Invitees feature as, like for @GaryFeutz, it seems to work fine for me this morning.
I was pretty sure that I had enough registered leaders in my den upload. I was afraid to upload with Just scouts and not leaders/parents, concerned that something would break on the import-possibly like this.
I will keep in mind for future den/pack meeting uploads and see what happens!
You cannot specify which leaders in the upload - just whether to include them or not. Since you opted to include, it pulled in all of them from the dropdown.
