Why MarketingCloudSDK for iOS always put "now" date in "startDateUtc" field?

Question

After some long time of investigating I realized that MarketingCloudSDK for iOS always returns startDateUtc field set to current date.

Here is a snippet from XCode logs:

[inboxmessage] returning messages (
    {
    alert = test;
    contentType = 2;
    endDateUtc = "2019-05-15 10:47:00 +0000";
    id = [...];
    messageDeleted = 0;
    messageHash = [...];
    name = "";
    read = 1;
    requestId = "[...]";
    sound = default;
    startDateUtc = "2019-04-17 10:41:17 +0000";
    statusDirty = 0;
    subject = "test subject line";
    subtitle = test;
    title = test;
    url = "https://pub.s10.exacttarget.com/[...]/";
},
    {
    alert = "test concrete";
    contentType = 2;
    endDateUtc = "2019-05-15 10:25:00 +0000";
    id = [...];
    messageDeleted = 0;
    messageHash = "[...]";
    name = "";
    read = 1;
    requestId = "[...]";
    sound = default;
    startDateUtc = "2019-04-17 10:41:17 +0000";
    statusDirty = 0;
    subject = "test concrete";
    subtitle = "test concrete";
    title = "test concrete";
    url = "https://pub.s10.exacttarget.com/[...]/";
},
    {
    alert = "test concrete delayed";
    contentType = 2;
    endDateUtc = "2019-05-15 11:30:00 +0000";
    id = [...];
    messageDeleted = 0;
    messageHash = [...];
    name = "";
    read = 1;
    sound = default;
    startDateUtc = "2019-04-17 10:41:17 +0000";
    statusDirty = 0;
    subject = "test concrete delayed";
    subtitle = "test concrete delayed";
    title = "test concrete delayed";
    url = "https://pub.s10.exacttarget.com/[...]/";
},

As you can see, startDateUtc is set to the same date for all messages, even when their Start Date was set to different time in Salesforce mobile push panel. I suppose, it is not expected behavior and looks like SDK bug. Is there any workaround for that? I would like to display mentioned date on custom table view cell, next to title and media image.

Please note, in order to get all inbox messages, I use:

MarketingCloudSDK.sharedInstance().marketingCloudSDK.sfmc_getAllMessages()

Answer 1

@marcinax, startDateUtc may be sent from the server to the SDK; if it is not part of the payload the SDK will set it locally to "now".

In your observations of the log, can you look for data recorded which starts the message with message response in MarketingCloudSDKInboxMessage.m.

This will indicate the raw payload being returned from the server. Please post a snippet here, if possible.

If the value for startDateUtc is not present in that payload, please open an investigation with your support contact in Marketing Cloud so that we can address this.