Are timepoints incremental?

API Question
#1

Hello,

In our system, we need to store the most recent timepoint consistently. As we process incoming events concurrently, we rely on the event.published_at timestamp to ensure that we always store the latest event. This is because we could not find any information about timepoints being incremental. However, we have encountered events with event.published_at timestamps that are either in the past or the future. Should we assume that the timepoints are incremental and check if they are greater than the timestamp of the most recently received event?

Thank you for your assistance in advance.

#2

Yes, timepoints are incremental (within each stream). Even if duplicate events are published (which happens a lot), the timepoint will be incremented.
Timepoints do not relate to timestamps, so don’t check if they are greater than the most recently received timestamp.

For checking this sort of thing, it can be useful to look at historical events. You can download a JSON file of the 10,000 most recently received events on each stream at Sample events from Companies House Streaming API . As can be seen in that file the timepoints are exactly incremental.

1 Like
#3

OK, thank you very much for your help! It is greatly appreciated.