Calendar Feed Updates
Once your calendar application has subscribed to a feed, it keeps receiving updates and stays in step with your Jira data. You do not need to re-subscribe.
The two delays
There are two independent delays between a change in Jira and what you see in your calendar.
Calendar Sync for Jira is rebuilding the feed. Each feed is rebuilt every 12 hours. The app checks hourly for feeds that are due, so a feed that has just been created or edited is picked up within about an hour. See Administration.
Your calendar application is collecting the data. This is usually the slower of the two, and it is entirely outside the app's control.
Application | Refresh behaviour |
|---|---|
Google Calendar | Refreshes several times a day; up to 12 hours before a Jira change appears. Users cannot trigger a refresh manually. |
Apple iPhone or iPad | Controlled by the account's Fetch New Data settings. Users can also refresh manually. |
Microsoft Outlook (Desktop) | Synchronises whenever Send / Receive runs, whether triggered manually or on Outlook's automatic interval. |
Microsoft Outlook.com | More than 24 hours before a Jira change appears. No manual refresh. |
Thunderbird | Refresh interval is configurable per calendar, and it can be refreshed manually. |
So in the ordinary case, expect a change in Jira to reach a user's calendar within a day.
What happens when you reconfigure a feed?
Existing subscriptions keep working when you change:
the JQL query, or the saved filter it came from
the time type, date fields, timezone or repetition setting
the event summary and description contents
the calendar title, organisation name or organisation email
Who can access the feed
In all of these cases, the URL your users already hold continues to serve data. The next rebuild simply produces different events, and their calendar applications pick those up on their usual schedule. There is no need to tell anyone to resubscribe.
Renaming a feed changes the URL that My Calendars displays, because the feed's name appears in the address. Existing subscriptions are expected to keep working regardless, because the subscription is identified by the token at the end of the URL rather than by the name. If you rename a feed, it is still worth checking with one subscribed user before assuming nobody needs to update their URL.
What can break an existing subscription?
Regenerating the Auth Key on the Security tab.
This is deliberate - it is how you revoke access to a URL that has been shared too widely, or that you suspect has leaked. Every existing subscription stops working immediately. Users must take the new URL from their My Calendars page and subscribe again.
The app warns you before you do it:
Changing the auth key will invalidate existing subscriptions, the users will need to update their calendar subscriptions from My Calendars page.
Deleting a feed also ends every subscription to it, permanently. Recreating a feed with the same settings produces a new URL, not the old one.
When updates stop arriving?
If a calendar has stopped updating altogether, check in this order:
The feed's status on the admin feeds page. An
errorstatus means the last rebuild failed.Enable Global Calendar Sync in the global configuration - if it is off, nothing is rebuilt anywhere.
Allowed days - if today is not an allowed day, nothing is rebuilt today.
The licence - while the licence is inactive, feeds are not rebuilt, and calendar URLs return an error.
The client's own refresh schedule - 24 hours of apparent silence is normal for Outlook.com and not a fault.