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How do timestamps work for collected and edited data?
How do timestamps work for collected and edited data?

Understanding the various timestamps for creating and editing data in Fulcrum.

Cory MacVie avatar
Written by Cory MacVie
Updated over a week ago

When you create or edit collected data using Fulcrum, the system keeps track of all changes at various states using full timestamps. The two most important one's timestamps work for are the times when users are creating or editing records from either their mobile application or from the web console. These are:

  • created_at  - time and date when the record was initially created (if importing, this is the time of the import)

  • updated_at  - time and date of the most recent edited change by a user

The Fulcrum system stores timestamps in UTC, and when you export your data, you can customize the export to convert those timestamps to your local time zone.

The other two timestamps you’ll see in your data have to do with when the data was stored on the server. When a user creates a new record in Fulcrum from their smartphone, it sets the created_at time to the exact second they created it. The system timestamps get set when the record is synced and stored on the server side:

  • system_created_at - time and date when record initially created on server

  • system_updated_at - time and date when record was last updated on server

This is an important distinction: if a user creates a record at 10:00am on their device, but doesn’t sync until the end of the day, Fulcrum will store both of these values for that record.

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