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Advanced Topics
Storing Timestamps

Storing Timestamps

You can enable timestamp recording through setRecordTimestamp, allowing Unix timestamps to be logged in each Change. Consequently, these timestamps will be preserved in exported Updates or Snapshots.

Enabling this feature affects the merge behavior of Changes, as Changes with too long a time gap cannot share the same timestamp. In such cases, you can adjust the mergeable duration range using setChangeMergeInterval, with a default setting of 1,000,000, equating to a 1000s threshold for merging Changes.

Each insertion or deletion by the user generates an op, and multiple consecutive ops can merge into a larger Change. Changes log a Timestamp, but each Change can only associate with one Timestamp. Hence, if the time gap is too wide, merging Changes becomes impractical. However, treating each Change as new based on slight timestamp differences (e.g., key presses milliseconds apart) introduces significant additional overhead for each Change. Therefore, users can customize the change merge interval according to their needs.

Note that these settings do not persist in exported Updates or Snapshots. Thus, if custom configurations are required, they must be reapplied upon each initialization of LoroDoc. Without timestamp recording enabled, the Timestamp defaults to the current maximum known Timestamp.