Set created_at time of discussions via API

Wulfheart

Hello,

I am currently trying to migrate an old phpBB forum to https://freeflarum.com.
I tried to set it via the API like below but it didn't work.

{
  "data":{
    "type": "discussions",
    "attributes": {
      "title": "Lorem Ipsum",
      "content": "Hello World",
      "created_at": "2021-12-12T19:00:00"
    },
    "relationships": {
      "tags": {
        "data": [
          {
            "type": "tags",
            "id": "1"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Normally I would just set it in the DB but this is currently no option as I have no access to it so I would like to set it via the API. Do you have any idea how I can achieve this?

clarkwinkelmann

Wulfheart what's the error ?

Apart from created_at not being a thing, I don't see any obvious issue with the payload. To backdate discussions and posts you could use my author edit extension which exposed new attributes for the author and dates to the API.

I don't think you can create API keys on FreeFlarum since you don't have access to the database so you might be a bit limited when using a user access token for the API.

Have you asked FreeFlarum if they can import the data for you? It would be much easier to migrate locally and then give FreeFlarum a data-only SQL dump to import, if they consent to doing it.

Wulfheart

@clarkwinkelmann Thank you really much for your response. I even saw that your extension is already installed.
Do you have any more information about what requests this extension need?

clarkwinkelmann

Wulfheart the attribute is called createdAt in my extension and any international date format should be supported (it uses Carbon::parse() internally).

The only caveat might be that when creating new discussions, the date will only be applied to the discussion but not the first post. I have actually never tried, but I suspect this is what would happen. The API was designed only for the use case of editing existing dates but the way it's implemented it probably works for new content, just not the fresh first post without a second API edit call on the post.

If that doesn't work correctly for new discussions I could publish a fix in the extension and FreeFlarum will pick up the update.

Wulfheart

Works like a charm.