How to automate email removal from a Google Calendar when a membership is canceled in MemberSpace

Hi ​@HardieS 

The general logic would be to find the existing event in GCal, take all of the existing attendees, run logic to remove the desired attendee, then update the existing GCal event with only the new list of attendees that excludes the attendee you want to remove.

Hi there ​@HardieS, welcome to the Community! 😁

Just checking in to see how you got on with Troy’s suggestion—did that approach do the trick?

Let us know if you got stuck at all, we’re happy to help further!

Hi Thank you both.

I got started with Troy’s suggestion and I’m a little stuck. We will continue to add new events as and when they come up to the calendar. If I just run the logic on a particular event will that change the calendar members so future events have the correct attendees? 

Thank you again!

You’re welcome, ​@HardieS. 🙂

Sorry to hear you’re a bit stuck. I did some checking and the Update Calendar Event action for Google Calendar would only be able to update the attendees for that specific event not any recurring events. 

Looking at Google’s API docs here, it seems that the only way to edit recurring event instances would be to split up the recurring events using two calls:

So in theory you could potentially use the following trigger and actions:

• Trigger: Cancelled Membership (MemberSpace) - triggers when a user cancels their membership.
• Action: Find Event (Google Calendar) - searches for the next event that you want to remove the attendee from.
• Action: Text > Replace Text (Formatter by Zapier) - removes the member’s email from the list of attendees (see: Find and replace values in your Zaps).
• Action: Find Event (Google Calendar) - searches for the original event by using the date value in the Created field (mapped from the previous Find Event action) as the start date.
• Action: Update Event (Google Calendar) - updates the original event setting the Repeat Until date to be before the start time of the next event.
• Action: Create Detailed Event (Google Calendar) - creates a new recurring event using the list of attendees output by the Formatter action.

One important caveat: Since a new event is created every time someone cancels, all attendees will receive a new calendar invite for the updated recurring event. Which may not provide the best experience for your members.

If you do decide to give that a try and run into any issues do let us know—happy to help!