Force a Google Calendar Refresh

29 May 2013

ScheduleShare is designed to refresh your event stream every time the feed is requested. This allows people to see the most up-to-date schedule for you as possible.

Most calendar programs allow you to configure how often the feed should be refreshed, defaulting from anywhere from every 15 minutes to every week. However, Google Calendar offers no refresh configuration and only updates subscribed calendars around once per day.

This can be a problem when you update events often, but there is a manual way to force Google Calendar to pull a fresh version.

The process is laid out in this blog post, but in summary, you add "?noCache" to the end of your feed url and Google will fetch an updated feed from ScheduleShare on the first fetch.

The resulting feed url will look similar to:

https://scheduleshare.net/feeds/1234.ics?noCache

Unfortunately, after that initial sync Google Calendar will be back to refreshing your feeds once or twice a day. If you require more frequent updating on a regular basis, you have to use something other than Google Calendar to display your ScheduleShare feeds. We recommend either the standard calendar application for your operating system, or our native HTML view available for every feed.

Please send us an email if you have any questions about feed updating.