I help to administer a Sharepoint 2007 for our organization (I say help but I am the only one). We use to have a developer that would do customization to the home page and add widgets that would pull information for different parts of the site. One of these cool widgets was one that pulled the next 3 birthdays from the corporate calendar and displayed them on the home page. Yesterday it was brought to my attention that a user that is no longer with the organization had their birthday still showing up on the home page. After investigation I found that the users Birthday event was still in the Corporate calendar. I clicked on the event and once open clicked the delete icon. This should solve the issue, well it didn’t, the user birthday still continued to show on the home page. I spent 2 hours just figuring out how this birthday information is pulled to the home page using a Content Query Tool webpart. I looked at the query information and everything looked fine. No amount of tinkering seemed to do anything, I thought that maybe the item was marked in the database as deleted and maybe I needed to filter based on the deleted field. Only after I did some research on how the calendar entries were stored in the database did a light bulb go on. I found that SharePoint stores reoccurring items in the database as just one item. If you delete just one occurrence then an exception is added and the calendar does not show it. For some reason this made me realize I only deleted the occurrence and not the series. So I decided to check next year on the same date and sure enough the users birthday was still listed. So when I opened this item I chose “Edit Series” at the top and then once I was dealing with the series I clicked the delete icon. Once the series was gone all my problems went away.
Now why the Content Query Tool does not know how to deal with calendar items and exceptions to series I have no clue about but I believe it is a bug. So I just thought I would help someone else out if they were having the same issues where they are pulling calendar items and you are dealing with reoccurring items and they don’t seem to delete properly.
© Caspan 2012