Discussion on using document level validation, history API, and custom hooks to validate and set updatedAt and publishedAt fields in Sanity.io.

Is it possible to have a validation for my

updatedAt

to be greater than the published date? Basically I don't want someone to be able to put that the article was updated at an older date than when it was published... I honestly wish this stuff was baked into Sanity 😐 but alas I have to manually do my own publishedAt and updatedAt fields.

It is baked into document level validation , where you can set, that a value cannot be bigger/smaller then the sibling or any other field in the whole document, or even the studio or the whole internet if you setup an async validation 😉The other question is why you don’t use the
history api for this and safe the doc history in some hidden fields, if you need longer retentions than a year?Another option is a (or even multiple) custom hook in the studio that automatically set those times and the person who set it through

currentUser()

from the Presence API whenever someone does changes the doc/a certain field etc.!This way you dont have any gaps in the data and dont have to make your editors do this
🙂

Happy to give you more pointers, if you tell me if you want it, and what you need

Well I didn't know about the history API or the Presence API 😅 and what they could potentially be used for. I know about the document level validation, I just didn't know how to grab another field's value and compare

Looking at the history API, I would only be able to get 3 days which I think would be fine? So for this example (screenshot), I would just manually set the published at date like I currently am and then grab that last published of 14 hours? 🤔

the thing you are looking at is just the visualisation of the history api, not the api itself 🙂

More is in our docs and refs 😉

Yeah I was just trying to visualize what I would be grabbing 😅

Its pretty neat with both, you could even display both in a custom badge

Gotcha, ok just gotta figure out how to call the history API as the docs just talk about the history, not how to leverage it

There are some guides etc.