Duplicate entries in iCal & OmniFocus, or items being moved to OF inbox
 

Hi,

I am seeing duplicated entries in iCal and OmniFocus. Strangely, the duplicated entries in OF are showing up with different contexts on some entries, and the same context for other groups, i.e., "Look for Electrician" is duplicated with the same context "home" and also has another duplicate with the context of "shopping-groceries"? Is this a bad database?

I have been using OF since the beta, and have OF for the iPhone as well. Mac OS 10.5.5, multiple machines. The database exists on a personal WebDAV server.

Thanks for any help.

Kurt

Is anything else on your Mac syncing with the iCal to-do database?

Unfortunately, the to-do database doesn't have a way to uniquely identify items - you can't rely on the name of the action because it might be modified, or you may have more than one action with the same name.

OmniFocus (and we suspect most other apps that sync to-dos) works around this problem by adding a link to the "URL" field of each to-do. This works to uniquely identify a to-do when a single product is syncing with iCal, but since each can only have one URL attached, if two products both try to sync with iCal, they stomp all over each other. The other product's links are going to look like brand-new actions to OmniFocus, and vice versa.

Another customer had duplicates start showing up in iCal, and we traced the problem back to this interaction.

I've had the same thing happen, lots of dupes. I have been syncing tasks to my Blackberry via Missing Sync. In particular, items in subgroups were always being duped and moved out of the hierarchy to the top level in each project. Also, as noted by Kurt, some weirdness with erratic context assignments among the duped items.

I toggled Missing Sync to overwrite the Blackberry tasks 100% of the time and that seems to have solved the problem. I can't enter or change tasks on the BB now, but hardly ever did, and always carry other ways of capturing to-do ideas anyway.

iCal overriding OF tasks
 

Every morning, once I open OmniFocus (1.7.3) and settle up any tasks that are now complete, I usually wait for it to sync to iDisk then initiate a sync with iCal. However, just about every time, iCal overrides any tasks I have completed as not finished and places the tasks in the Inbox.

If I click on Clean Up, the tasks do go back to their original Projects, but it does not return them to the completed state as they were in OF prior to syncing w/ iCal.

Any new tasks entered in OF prior to the last sync w/ iCal are still indeed in OF after the new sync as well as located in iCal.

Is this a known issue and is there a workaround (other than manually editing each changed instance)?

Are any other products syncing with iCal? If something else is modifying iCal's to-do list, it may be breaking the link to the originals in OmniFocus. That would be one thing that could cause OmniFocus to add a whole bunch of tasks to the inbox when you sync...

[QUOTE=Brian;67079]Are any other products syncing with iCal? If something else is modifying iCal's to-do list, it may be breaking the link to the originals in OmniFocus. That would be one thing that could cause OmniFocus to add a whole bunch of tasks to the inbox when you sync...[/QUOTE]

No, I am unaware of any other programs running syncs with iCal besides MobileMe. Certainly none that are creating/editing tasks in iCal; this even includes me creating tasks in iCal that may or may sync w/ OF.

Simply put, every time I make a change to a To-do in OF such as completion and/or date change, the initial sync with iCal causes the To-do in OF to move to the Inbox and change its completion status (if completed in OF), as well as the To-do list's order.

I've just started using the iCal synchronisation feature, and also noticed a few duplicate entries appearing. I do not sync iCal with any other software/device, and all OF synching happens within discrete calendars designated for the purpose (i.e. no non-OF entries in there). The duplicates I've encountered have all the same details, except that the OF reference URLs are different.

I just tried modifying a detail on one entry, and it synched ok, transferring the change through to one of the existing entries, but left the duplicate in place.

The only non-standard use recently is the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard, for which I did a clean install (i.e. not using Migration Assistant), and copied across the Preferences file and Application Support folder, then upgraded the OmniFocus software when prompted that I didn't have the latest version. I notice that this newer version mentions updates to sync issues in the release notes.

OmniFocus 1.7.3 (v77.40 r118571) running on Snow Leopard (10.6.1).

I have exactly the same problem. Usually I backup OF, then sync with iCal, find a lot of actions in the inbox, and then restore from backup...
I also use Bento, but I never create new tasks from Bento.

Hmmm... if nothing else is syncing with iCal, this doesn't sound like something I've heard of before. We'd love to investigate it with you, though - if you send email to the [EMAIL="omnifocus@omnigroup.com"]support ninjas[/EMAIL] we can look into what's going on here. Sorry again for the trouble it's causing.

I have this issue. Annoying.