Does every published Rails Event Store event have a timestamp?

Question

Does every Rails Event Store event that's been published automatically get assigned a timestamp? I'm trying to build functionality that relies upon a timestamp automatically being present for events deserialized from the event_store within a job, but I don't know that I can rely on that. I'm hoping that one does not need to manually add a timestamp to the event's metadata in order for a timestamp to be present, since it doesn't appear that that's been done anywhere in the code base I'm working on. I'm aware that the docs indicate that the return value of the RubyEventStore::Event#timestamp method can be nil, but I'm hoping that it won't be nil for published events.

Answer 1

Unless you provide your own timestamp (the :timestamp key in metadata) each stored event will have metadata enriched with current time - see https://github.com/RailsEventStore/rails_event_store/blob/master/ruby_event_store/lib/ruby_event_store/client.rb#L311

It can be nil. But only if your clock provided to RailsEventStore client will return nil.

In upcoming Rails Event Store 2.0 release we will also add the validity time (valid_at attribute in metadata) that will allow to implement BI Temporal event sourcing. Stay tuned.