Android calendar syncing is broken for me!

For the past couple of weeks, (shortly after my nexus s upgraded itself to ICS), the calendar on my phone has not been syncing with Google. This has required me to use the calendar website on my phone, which is not a pleasant experience at all. So today, I hooked my phone up to my computer and decided to do some debugging. Using adb logcat, I found this stack trace:

E/AndroidRuntime(15353): FATAL EXCEPTION: SyncAdapterThread-2
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): android.util.TimeFormatException: Parse error at pos=2
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at android.text.format.Time.nativeParse(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at android.text.format.Time.parse(Time.java:440)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.android.calendarcommon.RecurrenceSet.populateContentValues(RecurrenceSet.java:189)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.EventHandler.entryToContentValues(EventHandler.java:1138)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.EventHandler.applyEntryToEntity(EventHandler.java:616)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.CalendarSyncAdapter.getServerDiffsImpl(CalendarSyncAdapter.java:2223)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.CalendarSyncAdapter.getServerDiffsForFeed(CalendarSyncAdapter.java:1954)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.CalendarSyncAdapter.getServerDiffsOrig(CalendarSyncAdapter.java:945)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.CalendarSyncAdapter.innerPerformSync(CalendarSyncAdapter.java:417)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.syncadapters.calendar.CalendarSyncAdapter.onPerformLoggedSync(CalendarSyncAdapter.java:302)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at com.google.android.common.LoggingThreadedSyncAdapter.onPerformSync(LoggingThreadedSyncAdapter.java:33)
E/AndroidRuntime(15353): at android.content.AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter$SyncThread.run(AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter.java:247)
W/ActivityManager( 153): Force finishing activity com.google.android.calendar/com.android.calendar.AllInOneActivity
V/CalendarSyncAdapter(15353): GDataFeedFetcher thread ended: mForcedClosed is true

Thanks to Evan I was able to clone the git repo for the Calendar app (https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Calendar.git) , and spent some time today trying to track down this bug.

Unfortunately, the buggy code is in calendarcommon, which isn’t included as part of the git file, and is actually nearly impossible to find. At any rate, with some more digging, the closest I could get is the code here
http://git.insignal.co.kr/?p=mirror/aosp/platform/frameworks/opt/calendar.git;a=blob;f=src/com/android/calendarcommon/RecurrenceSet.java

I think there needs to be a try/except block for that whole method (around line 189) that returns false if an exception is thrown. For some reason that TimeFormatException is derived from RuntimeError (!!). The common code doesn’t seem to be installed as part of the calendar app. From quickly looking at the code, It appears as if it is installed as part of the os and registers itself as the handler for calendar uris.

So if I wanted to fix this myself, I’m wonder whether I would have to fork the code above, and install it as a new handler, then somehow hide the one with the OS? I have to think about this a bit more. The other problem is that since this is a common library, many other calendar apps might suffer from the same exception when they attempt to sync.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to figure out what event is causing this error (not easy since there are no logs that can help me) and/or think of buying an iPhone.

If you know anyone on Android who could help with this, please let me know.

Edit:
I’m downloading the entire android source code, and I think I’m going to try to re-build a patched version of the common code, uninstall the existing common code, and push the new one over it. I’ll update this post with progress …