Recurring Event StartDate in SP Calendar edit form

Question

We have an OOTB SharePoint calendar that is used for managing corporate events. Several new fields were added to the list so we created a custom edit form (editFormModified.aspx) in SP Designer. Recently a user reported that if they attempt to edit a series of recurring events the edit form does not contain the start date. This means they are forced to enter a new start date if they want to save their changes and lose some of the previous recurring events in the series.

We have checked to confirm that the start date is saved correctly initially but not available in our custom edit form. If we open the same recurring event in the default edit form (editForm.aspx) the start date is visible.

We included the recurring event field in the editFormModified.aspx:

<tr>
    <td width="190px" valign="top" class="ms-formlabel">
        <H3 class="ms-standardheader">
            <nobr>Recurrence</nobr>
        </H3>
    </td>
    <td width="400px" valign="top" class="ms-formbody">
        <SharePoint:FormField runat="server" id="ff8{$Pos}" ControlMode="Edit" FieldName="fRecurrence" __designer:bind="{ddwrt:DataBind('u',concat('ff8',$Pos),'Value','ValueChanged','ID',ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),'@fRecurrence')}"/>
        <SharePoint:FieldDescription runat="server" id="ff8description{$Pos}" FieldName="fRecurrence" ControlMode="Edit"/>
    </td>
</tr>

I can also recreate this behavior in other calendars in our site collection by the following steps:

1. Create a recurring event in SharePoint calendar
2. Create a custom edit form in SP Designer
3. View recurring event and select edit series (start date will not be visible)

Does anyone know why this is happening or ways to correct this? So far we are unable to find any reason the start date would be empty in the edit form.

Answer 1

Thanks to Dennis at technet for answering this question. Please see his full answer there.

Here's the solution:

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
    var startDate = $("input[title='Start Time']").val();
    $("input[title=' When this event begins']").attr("value",startDate);
});

Include the above on the edit form. The Start Date for the series is already avialable on the form, so just copy it to the correct location.