Bug 400043

Summary: Korganizer categories are broken; never stay selected, and duplicate themselves
Product: [Applications] korganizer Reporter: Alexandre Bonneau <alexandre.bonneau>
Component: generalAssignee: kdepim bugs <pim-bugs-null>
Status: CONFIRMED ---    
Severity: major CC: auxsvr, box42, etienne, xaltranlo
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 5.9.1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Debian testing   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Alexandre Bonneau 2018-10-19 21:50:33 UTC
To sum up, I have an old 2012 ics calendar created by Korganizer between 2005 up until the end of 2012, then all hell broke loose and Korganizer categories got broken.

I was since then unable to use korganizer as before (ie. with correctly working categories and categories' colors), but I now need to be able to use Korganizer again.

The categories problem still exists 6 years after ; basically you cannot create and use a category; it unselect itself when editing the event/task again, and the category keeps duplicating itself when opening the category list.


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
I tested 3 things;
- with my old calendar and current settings,
- with my old calendar and a brand new user,
- with a new calendar and a new user.
In each case, the bug was there.


> With my old calendar and current settings
Note: my old calendar has 233087 lines and is 6.9MB big.
`grep VEVENT calendar.ics|wc -l` lists 11470 events.
`grep VTODO calendar.ics|wc -l` lists 17668 tasks.

1. Open Korganizer
2. Double-click an existing event with a 'Work' category to edit it (You know this is a work event since it's color is correctly shown, and the tooltip does show the correct Work category)
3. Select the 'click to add tags' button to open the categories window
4. See that the 'Work' category (or any other categories) are _unselected_
5. Additionally see that the 'Work' category is currently duplicated 5 times
6. Cry


> with my old calendar and a brand new user
1. Create a new user
2. Login with that new user
3. Open the brand new Korganizer
4. Create a new agenda and point it to the existing 6.9MB ics calendar file
5. Wait 1 hour and 45 minutes for akonadi/korganizer to finish 'importing' it (Akonadi/Korganizer can only import 4.63 events/tasks per seconds, on my 12 core cpus, with 32GB of ram, really?! :/)
6. Go into the settings; there are NO categories shown in the color settings (it looks like those are not imported during the...import)
6. Double-click an existing event you KNOW has the 'Work' category to edit it
7. Select the 'click to add tags' button to open the categories window
8. See that the 'Work' category just appeared in that list, but still is _unselected_
9. Check the categories on another event (ie. 'Fun'), and see that the categories list is now showing two unselected 'Work' and 'Fun' categories.
10. If you edit any Work event and check the categories list, then you can see that the 'Work' category is duplicated 5+ times, but still all are unselected
10. Cry again


> with a new calendar and a new user
1. Create a new user
2. Login with that new user
3. Open the brand new Korganizer
4. Create a few new categories : 'Work', 'Fun', 'Soirée', 'Administrative work'
5. Create an event without categories
6. Create an event with the 'Work' category selected
7. Go into the settings to add a specific color to the 'Work' category (ie. blue)
8. Check that in the agenda view, the 2nd event is correctly colored in blue
9. Double-click on that event (with the 'Work' category) to edit it
10. Click the button next to the falsely advertised placeholder 'click to add tags' field, to open the categories window
11. See that the 'Work' category (or any other categories) are _unselected_
12. See that the 'Work' category is currently duplicated 2 times
13. Close those windows and re-edit the event then show the tag window; the 'Work' category has been duplicated again
14. Try to cry since you have no tears left


OBSERVED RESULT
Well, in all cases, the categories at utterly broken, even on a new Kde user with a new agenda. (Is there any QA done for Korganizer?)


EXPECTED RESULT
Categories should :
1. Be listed directly instead of the 'Click here to add tags' placeholder (separated by a comma), currently they are not and I imagine this is related to this bug
2. Be correctly selected in the categories list, and stay selected between edits
3. Accepts accentuated characters in their names without getting duplicated
4. Not be duplicated in the categories list


SOFTWARE VERSIONS
(info given by kinfocenter)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.13.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.49.0
Qt Version: 5.11.1

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I'm sad, does this help?
Let's hope this won't take 6 years again ;P
Do you need the original ics file? I tried anonymizing it using https://github.com/collective/plone.app.eventindex/blob/master/anonical.py, but that removes too much information (including the categories). Do you have a script of your own to remove sensitive information? (ie. title, description, attached files, journal, etc.)
Comment 1 Etienne 2022-11-28 08:26:00 UTC
Still present in KOrganizer 5.19.3
No tears left either.
Comment 2 Alexandre Bonneau 2022-11-28 10:37:26 UTC
Also in Korganizer 5.21.3.
The categories are still a pain to use; they still get duplicated, they still are un-sorted, they still 'sometimes' decide to forget the color they were assigned to, and they still aren't coherent between Korganizer and say, Kmail.
Comment 3 Alexandre Bonneau 2025-06-21 07:35:40 UTC
> Let's hope this won't take 6 years again ;P

Well, to be fair, it's been 7 years now..

The bug is still present, but a bit differently;
categories are definitely very, VERY broken (right now version 6.3.3 just remove any tags when saving a task/event modification), but before that, they stayed selected, and only duplicated themselves when there was an accent in it (but that's yet another bug).
I haven't seen a tag duplication for a while (except with accentuated characters that gets mangled, so for instance the tag 'corrigé' is duplicated has 'corrigé').
Comment 4 Wolfgang 2025-10-17 13:04:45 UTC
Similar observations here. For me, this is a major usability problem for a calendar as I use color filled events (at least I'd like to).

* Categories and category color handling is different between PIM components. 
* In KOrganizer, once a color has been newly assigned to a category, colors and categories get out of sync even if the dialog is closed in between. 
* In Settings menu, categories can be changed (with a weird UI), but no colors are shown or changeable.
* In Settings/Color dialog, categories cannot be changed. Nowhere can you see the whole color palette for all categories.
* The color dialog is pretty useless from a usability point of view. This is not a drawing program, what users actually need is a choice of palettes of say 16-20 entries suitable for calendars. Check out LibreOffice for a better (if not perfect) approach (or MS Outlook).
* In the event dialog, colors are not shown in the category list (which also has a weird UI and is not editable).

KOrganizer Version 6.5.1 (25.08.1)
Operating System: Kubuntu 25.10
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.17.0-5-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.8 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Comment 5 Alexandre Bonneau 2025-10-17 23:10:15 UTC
> The color dialog is pretty useless from a usability point of view. This is not a drawing program, what users actually need is a choice of palettes of say 16-20 entries suitable for calendars. Check out LibreOffice for a better (if not perfect) approach (or MS Outlook).

Hold your horses my friend! This proposition above is a big no no!

The ability to select specific colors is really important. What do you do if you have only 16-20 entries, and have more than 20 categories (I know I do)?
What do you do if you do not like the colors the devs chose, or if you are color blind?
I despise the default palette colors in most software that do not allow the user to change it. Devs are not artists usually.

So no. Please do not remove the ability to specifically chose the colors you want to use.
The kde way is to give users the choice to create their own configuration.
Comment 6 Wolfgang 2025-10-18 06:17:34 UTC
>  This proposition above is a big no no!

Sorry for being not clear. I'm not proposing to remove the ability to select your own colors. But most people, including me, have neither the time nor skill to create their own palette. Take a look at LibreOffice. They give you a choice of a) selecting a predefined palette, b) loading palettes from other sources, and c) define your own from scratch. 

My current approach is to find a suitable palette online, then transfer the colors manually one by one with the color picker (which is going to take an evening). And KOrganizer doesn't even remember user defined colors between two invocations. This is not what I call a productive environment.