Is it Possible to Programmatically Override Activity Story LastUpdate Date on Creation?

While story types can set the LastUpdateDate, most do not. As an example, blog posts do (because they support scheduled publishing), but forum threads don't.

What type of content are you migrating that you want to adjust?

Ben Tiedt said:

What type of content are you migrating that you want to adjust?

Forum Thread/Replies

I should also mention, that I'm not tied to LastUpdateDate as a fix method. My end goal is to have the migrated posts merge more like a zipper into existing posts as if they were always a part of the story stream. If there is a better method, I'll happily take it!

Digging deeper, it appears that the post Add date seems correct but the Replies are not referencing the date set from REST but the time it was imported:

• Actors [IList-of-ActivityStoryActor]
  • [0] [ActivityStoryActor]
    • ActorId: d17466a4-a9f5-4d1e-8754-22ea3dce9270 [Guid]
    • Date: 6/30/2011 3:21:40 PM [DateTime]
    • User [User]
    • UserId: 39585 [Int32]
    • Verb: "Add" [String]
  • [1] [ActivityStoryActor]
    • ActorId: c0fca003-db74-42dc-b632-4e347d873c16 [Guid]
    • Date: 9/22/2022 3:18:17 PM [DateTime] Actual Reply: 6/30/2011 3:54 PM
      
    • User [User]
    • UserId: 46753 [Int32]
    • Verb: "Reply" [String]
  • [2] [ActivityStoryActor]
    • ActorId: fa01082d-1f33-420d-b191-48a4acf5b995 [Guid]
    • Date: 9/22/2022 3:18:17 PM [DateTime] Actual Reply: 6/30/2011 5:01 PM
      
    • User [User]
    • UserId: 46886 [Int32]
    • Verb: "Reply" [String]
  • [3] [ActivityStoryActor]
    • ActorId: c750abdf-a875-4807-975f-4c71b1926a5b [Guid]
    • Date: 9/22/2022 3:18:17 PM [DateTime] Actual Reply: 6/30/2011 7:13 PM
    • User [User]
    • UserId: 39585 [Int32]
    • Verb: "Reply" [String]
  • Count: 4 [Int32]
• Content [Content]
• ContentId: 48311d09-63d8-4101-b8d8-017e2871fad0 [Nullable-of-Guid]
• ContentTypeId: 46448885-d0e6-4133-bbfb-f0cd7b0fd6f7 [Nullable-of-Guid]
• CreatedDate: 6/30/2011 3:21:40 PM [DateTime]
• ExtendedAttributes [IList-of-IExtendedAttribute]
• LastUpdate: 9/22/2022 3:18:17 PM [DateTime]

I'm not sure if that information is helpful, but wanted to share in case it is easier to change/update.

Long term, this will require a bug fix to ensure that LastUpdatedDate is always set in activity stories (it defaults to "now" which is affecting the creation of stories for forum content created in the past):

A shorter-term fix may be to manually update the story LastUpdatedDates in the database to match their CreatedDate values (assuming there is a way to detect which stories are related to migrated content -- perhaps by a date range for CreateDate, for example).

Thanks Ben!

We're keeping track of content IDs for redirect purposes from the original site so I think it's possibly do able. Can you share the database tables to be looking at? (Via PM is fine if that's not something desired to be posted publicly)

The table is te_ActivityStream_Stories. The fields are going to pretty self-explanatory. You may also want to update the LastUpdatedDates on the actors--these are in te_ActivityStream_StoryActors.

For any searching later before the bug has been fixed, we ended up needing to update both the Stories and the Story Actors using a join of the table on the StoryId. Has the slight disadvantage of all of the replies being at the "same time" as the original post, but for the needs of our use case, that's an optimization we can live with rather than trying to dig into every story id to trace back to the source and then cross that with the original date/times from the source. Thanks Ben.