Ruby Event Store Browser not loading events because of nil error

[xhs345]

The API call to load events is returning a 500 error for me and I'm unsure what is wrong.

NoMethodError - undefined method `iso8601' for nil:NilClass:

in https://github.com/RailsEventStore/rails_event_store/blob/v1.1.1/ruby_event_store-browser/lib/ruby_event_store/browser/json_api_event.rb#L32

I tested with both 1.0.0 and 1.1.1.

An example metadata entry of the batch that is parsed.

---
:timestamp: 2020-09-14 14:14:28.791973839 Z

Screenshot of all records that are loaded in the batch.

Setup is pretty standard otherwise, not using custom serializer or similar

[mostlyobvious]

Can you please double-check that you don't have ---\n:timestamp:\n in metadata row?

Error message would suggest there was :timestamp key in metadata, however its value was nil.

SELECT id from event_store_events WHERE metadata LIKE "%:timestamp:\n%"

[xhs345]

I know, it's quite strange. I can see the query that was run before the error in the console and it returns the rows shown above. Also to double check I ran the following query on my database to ensure I have a timestamp entry for each record with some date:

SELECT event_store_events.* FROM event_store_events WHERE (event_store_events.metadataNOT LIKE '%timestamp: 2020%' ANDevent_store_events.metadata NOT LIKE '%timestamp: 2019%')

and got no results back

[mostlyobvious]

Is there a way you could recreate this error in a sample app?

[xhs345]

I'll give it a try!

[mostlyobvious]

1. Full backtrace would definitely help
2. Are you perhaps using your own Event class or the one from https://github.com/RailsEventStore/cqrs-es-sample-with-res/blob/5e25050f572a0563cc550e528d96def74cb329a9/lib/event.rb? I've received similar report today

@xhs345

[xhs345]

Yes, we mostly copied the event class from your demo project (I think the only difference is that we named it AppEvent).
I'll try to add a full backtrace

[mostlyobvious]

It all comes to https://github.com/RailsEventStore/cqrs-es-sample-with-res/blob/0de944cf7fa31ba26ee1572b3ccb4d3215b14aed/lib/event.rb#L7

There are several lessons to unpack from it:

• never use rescue nil even if you think you’re covered, legit errors got swallowed
• Time.parse(metadata.delete(:timestamp)) works fine when you expect metadata value to be transformed by JSON.dump into string (the case of cqrs-es-sample app and its choice of mapper/database columns of jsonb) but fails miserably on YAML and Time

I have newer implementation of dry-struct event to share from commercial project, that eventually would become a gem.
RES 2.0 is going to handle timestamps differently, so that choice of metadata serialization does not really matter anymore (#674)

For now please change your AppEvent.new to following:

  def self.new(data: {}, metadata: {}, **rest)
    super(rest.merge(data).merge(metadata: metadata))
  end

[xhs345]

Thanks, will give that a try!