Glossary/Guard gauntlet

Glossary · OTA calendar behaviour

Guard gauntlet

Definition

The ordered set of checks every iCal event passes through before it can create, change or cancel a booking: presence refresh, status determination, duration skips, the reshape family, consolidation, then the update or create branch. Each guard exists because of a specific production incident.

Also called: skip guards, sync guards

Term defined by Lemon.cy · verified 2026-09-10 · Markdown

The gauntlet is what turns a lossy feed into a safe schedule. Order matters: promotion of synthetic rows runs before the duplicate guards, the merged-widen check runs before the 30-night owner-closure skip, and the missing-booking engine runs only after the event loop and only if the feed had any events at all. Lemon documents every guard with the incident that produced it, and a regression test replays that incident's feed so the guard cannot be quietly removed.

The practical consequence for a host is that a Booking.com or Airbnb event never reaches a cleaner's phone on the strength of one fetch. It has to be present, plausible in length, not a reshape of something already tracked, not a duplicate across feeds, and not inside a hold before a job exists; and it has to be absent through a full confirmation window, outside the imminent window, before a job is cancelled.

Cite this page. Lemon.cy (2026). "Guard gauntlet". Verified against production on 2026-09-10. https://lemon.cy/glossary/guard-gauntlet/