Can't search event in iCal Leopard

Hi Chenry,

It's not a Leopard problem I believe it's an upgrade to Leopard problem.

I believe an old iCal / spotlight index locks out iCal search.

I found a corrupted, invisible spotlight index caused this on my system.

Once I removed it and exported/ reimported my individual calendars it was gone.

Do you have spotlight function (indexing, searching)?

Did you upgrade install or archive erase install ?

Let me know.

Message was edited by: Itsaulgud

Hi Itsaulgud,
thank you for your answer.

Here is my install-Plan:
-delete Harddisk,
-clean install Leopard-system,
-re-create iCal-data from Backup (I can see the events),
-but I can´t see the event-list after a search-instruction, the window is empty,
-then I create the spotlight-index again,
-after that I search the keywords with spotlight directly and then with iCal - nothing, it´s all the same.

Question:
Where can I find a corrupted, invisible spotlight-index in my Leopard-system?
What can I do?

Let me know.

Message was edited by: chenry.

Chenry,

Export each individual calendar and erase them from iCal.

I would force spotlight to reindex then import each calendar separately.


If you look above you'll read where I just got ****** and deleted everything on my system drive that had iCal or spotlight in the name. The corrupt spotlight index would not delete, I removed it from trash and placed it on my desktop.

I then upgraded my stripped 10.5 with the install disk to restore iCal and Spotlight,Imported my previously exported individual calendars and all was well.

I have never had the problem again as well as after I upgraded to 10.5.1


P.S.

I stored my exported calendars on another drive before I did the mad erasing thing.

I also excluded all of my drives to stop spotlight from indexing before I started erasing.

I was able to delete the "corrupt" spotlight index after I restored iCal and Spotlight.

Um, I have leopard, with ical3.0.1. I type in a key word in the Search thingy (with the magnifying glass) at the top right of the screen and I get a spill-out at the bottom with all the related events.

Hi Itsaulgud,
my system is running well now. I can now search and find events in iCal!!!

I have over my system 10.5.1 installed again MacOSX10.5 (with the function "ARCHIV AND INSTALL"). The old system-data was stored in the File "PREVIOUS SYSTEM" and the User-data was saved. A new MacOSX10.5.-system was installed with the old User-data. After that I have create the spotlight-index again. The search-function in iCal works now. After that I have upgraded to MacOSX10.5.1.
That´s all.

Thank you for your help!!!

I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

This has been a big problem for me, too. I have a separate Calendar called >Notes, with a daily recurring all-day event called "Daily Notes". Each day at work I use the event as a poor-man's journal. But now, iCal won't find anything in the Notes text field. It has no problem searching event notes in any other calendar, or even searching dummy events I've created in my >Notes calendar. Very frustrating. Spotlight wasn't finding anything, either.

WHAT I TRIED: Reindexed Spotlight, NG. Exported my >Notes calendar to my desktop, reimported, still NG. Deleted all the Index files in the various iCal Sources folders, still NG. Reindexed Spotlight. At this point, Spotlight now finds my search text properly, listing multiple "Daily Notes" events where my text appears, but iCal search for the same text STILL DOESN'T WORK.

THE WORKAROUND: Download the preview version of Bento from the FileMaker website. Bento is a kind of quick-and-dirty database program "for the rest of us", with built-in templates for accessing your Address Book data and iCal data. It gives you separate access to Events and Tasks (to-do's), with both table and form views for each. Oh yeah, searching totally works!

Hi Chenry,

Glad to hear you're searching(and finding) again.

Best of the holidays to you and all the best in 2008.

Mike,

you have all the frustrating symptoms I had.

The partial indexing is exceptionally so.

I'd bet when you reindex there is still a corrupted v100 file on your drive.

Exclude your drive from spotlight indexing and look for folder .spotlight-v100.

I believe that contains your indexes.

If you delete that folder Spotlight should reindex from scratch and have completely fresh indexes. I did not get complete Leopard Spotlight operation until I did that. It seems the way Leopard works,Spotlight and iCal are
much more integrated.I deleted Spotlight from my drive using Tiger and had full iCal operation.You can't do that now.

Thanks for the heads up on Bento. I'm going to test drive it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I did delete the invisible .spotlight-v100 folder, but after reindexing Spotlight there wasn't any improvement for searching within iCal.

Strangely enough, Spotlight searching itself is inconsistent. If I search for one particular search-term, I get the following results:

Spotlight menu-bar: 6 iCal meeting notices plus 1 "Daily Notes" event
Search bar in Finder window: 3 iCal meeting notices, only
Search bar in iCal: 3 meeting notices, only

I'm just hoping 10.5.2 will address this problem.

Mike,

I think you also need to export each of your calendars separately and delete them from iCal before you delete the spotlight index. the two together seems to be why many are getting partial or no resolution to this search problem. Your odd search results seems to indicate that even after you delete the spotlight index manually.
it is still reindexing gummed up iCal indexes. If all calendars are deleted before reindexing with spotlight your system is starting fresh and as you reimport those old calendars Leopard spotlight sees them clearly. I also had the same odd results in spotlight before I fixed the problem. I was amazed at how efficient spotlight was after I got it "cleaned up"

I had the same problem but got it working by forcing a new indexing. I followed the instructions here, but first enabled indexing by doing the "Power user tip" at the bottom of the page.

http://www.thinkmac.net/blog/archives/mac-tips-daily-186-reindex-spotlight.html


I did the new indexing per link above and iCal seems to be working fine now. Thanks!!!

Hello,

I need some help. The instructions for setting up ichat from the online MAC support have useless for me. It tells me to follow that prompts for setup after opening ichat. However, when I open ichat, there are no prompts, so I have no clue what to do. Please help me if you can.

Queenskillet: it looks like you inadvertently posted your message in an unrelated thread. You might want to delete your message here and post it as a new topic for greater visibility.

i have the same problem after upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 : no search in iCal

this problem is obviously linked to Spotlight, and none of the solutions proposed here worked for me (may be reinstalling would work, but it's not a solution for me !)

forcing Spotlight to reindex the whole volume ( sudo mdutil -E / ) didn't work, but i noticed that i could force Spotlight to index events with the following command : mdimport Library/Calendars/

this could be a temporary workaround, although the process has to be triggered manually, but... while i can now find events via Spotlight (upper right corner) or the Finder, the search function is still broken in iCal ! there's obviously a broken link between iCal and Spotlight

BTW, a few other things i tried :
- creating a new user account, with virgin iCal, added an event : search didn't work, so it seems to be a system wide problem
- backed-up iCal and restored on an iMac (that was upgraded exactly in the same way) : search worked perfectly

I tried this an it worked.
I don't LOVE Leopard.
But it did work at least for now to export each ical event and import them back. Now I can search.
I also hate that you have to use Apple I to get to notes.
Thanks for this.
Timothy