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.
Two issues I’ll bring up here: one new, and one old.
New Issue.
When scheduling meetings with leaders, I like to include an agenda in the event description. The length of this agenda was not an issue in SB. However, IA is giving me an error that the event description needs to be less than 500 characters. This is despite the character count at the bottom of the input window indicating that is should accept 65535 characters (see screen grab below).
Old Issue
When I include these agendas, I’d like to be able to include leading spaces so that I can visually nest sub-items rather than awkwardly attempting to use special characters to differentiate nested levels (i.e. “-” and “>”) or leading with a line of “…”. This was a point of irritation with Scoutbook Event descriptions that I was hoping would be fixed in the transfer to IA, but indenting still does not seem to be supported.
Hello, I can confirm this behavior also. My unit is a Troop and I have tried creating campouts and Troop Meetings directly within IA calendar. Both event types will yield the error message (I also observe this behavior with existing events created within scoutbook calendar that I attempt to edit within IA calendar).
If the event description contains more than 500 characters, it will let me create the event, but when I hit the Save Event button (thus, save a change to the newly-created event), the error message pops up: “description” length must be less than or equal to 500 characters long. At that point, I must delete enough characters to get below the 500 character limit to get the event to save.
I have had the same exceeding 500 characters issue and have had to correct this on many calendar entries that were started in Scoutbook but tried to do something in the IA calendar. Short and simple Event Descriptions and breaking some info in the notes which allows 65535 seems to help. But I wish it was the other way around.
Yes Events originally created in Scoutbook Calendar and then tried to edit the event in IA Calendar (like trying to tie camping/hiking to these events).
I can confirm that newly created events also have this issue. Our troop has no legacy events that were created in SB, as we are experimenting with the new IA2 calendar before we roll it out to our troop. The event in the attached screenshot was created this week and I initially had over 500 characters in the event description field and IA2 would not let me save the event. I deleted some content and got it down to 487 and then it let me save.
My suggestion would be to have the UI show a max of 500 chars and then to not allow the user to type beyond 500, or to remove the error check on the save button and allow the max to be whatever the database and subscribed calendars can handle as a max.
This occurs when editing a legacy SB event or when editing a new event created in the IA calendar (IA calendar will create the new event, but as soon as I attempt to edit/update an event created in IA calendar, the “over 500 characters error” appears) .
I tested two conditions and both are working as expected for me on Safari on a Mac:
Description Text can exceed 500 characters (result=passed; entered 687 characters.)
Description Text in excess of 500 characters syncs properly to 3rd Party Apple Calendar. (result=passed; all 687 characters were displayed properly in Apple Calendar.)
