Magento CSV file created_at not imported

Question

I cannot update created_at & updated_at attributes of products via CSV import. I'm looking in the catalog_product_entity DB, and the values are not updated accordingly (created_at still tells the product's creation timestamp, while update_at becomes the latest import's timestamp).

My locale is Romanian (ro_RO), but changing the country and locale to English does not make a difference.

I've tried several formats:

• 2015-10-25 3:34:20 as suggested by Magento's import sample file
• 28.11.2020, 18:22 as it appears if I do a Magento product export
• 2015-q35y4hwrg10-25 3:34:20 an invalid date format; no error is thrown, import carries on successfully

I am not using any other extra plugin to do the import, it's the standard Magento one.

Would even be nice to know where to debug this issue.

References

• The Complete Guide to Magento 2 Product Import / Export
• Importing system attribute "created_at" with a timestamp
• Incorrect behaviour of export/import logic for product with datetime attribute
• date issues in magento 2.3.3

Versions: Magento 2.3.5-p1, PHP 7.3.24

Answer 1

Judging by what you've come across previously, I think you are trying to change a fundamental part of the Zend framework and database schema that underpins Magento, as such, I don't believe you can easily override these values.

The "updated_at" column is defined within the database structure, as can be seen in the image below:

If you amend the the product, then the "updated_at" column gets the timestamp of the amendment, if you wish to stop this behavior, then you are going to have to amend the database schema for that column. I'm not sure what knock on issue this will cause, since any amendments completed will not automatically update this column (such as altering the description on the front end GUI).

The "created_at" column is I think contained within the model and as such, any imported columns trying to override this value will be simply ignored.

I've come across this issue in Laravel which uses the Eloquent for handling databases, this utilises "created_at" and "updated_at" columns quite a bit and expects them to be present unless you specifically tell it not to or which columns to use instead. I don't think with Magento, whether you will have that option or not.