Inconsistent documentation about creationTime

[smousa]

Maybe I am looking at an old version of the documentation and I don't know it yet.

The firestore documentation says that the creationTime on the auth.UserMetadata object should be a formatted UTC string of the date.

https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/admin/node/admin.auth.UserMetadata#creationtime

And if you look at the definition for the lastRefreshTime it elaborates on a UTC string as "eg 'Sat, 03 Feb 2001 04:05:06 GMT'"

However, when I verify this by retrieving the creationTime from a functions trigger running on my emulator, the resulting value is a string of the millisecond timestamp.

Is that expected? Is that the same behavior I should expect when running in a live environment? I haven't tried it live yet, but I will update this ticket if I notice an inconsistency.

What I am ultimately asking for is clarification within the documentation itself, because it is confusing.

Thanks!

[sam-gc]

Hi, thanks for reaching out. I believe this is unrelated to the emulator UI. I'm going to transfer this issue over to the emulator suite

[smousa]

update: I have verified that the live version of firebase auth presents the creationTime as 2021-01-29T02:02:11Z
So it looks like you have divergent behaviors between the emulator and the live system.

[yuchenshi]

Would you mind posting some code about how you retrieved the user and creationTime? We'd be glad to take a deeper look.

[smousa]

Run this cloud function in the emulator and against a real system and you will see the difference

import * as functions from 'firebase-functions';

export default functions.auth.user().onDelete(async (user) => {
  functions.logger.info(user.metadata.creationTime, typeof user.metadata.creationTime)
})

[mdesoto]

Can confirm that this is still an issue.

[yuchenshi]

Hi all, thanks for the input. It is now clear that the problem is with the Firebase Auth emulator and I'll track this as a bug. PRs welcome too. (Previously, I got a bit confused and did not triage this in time since OP mentions "firestore" but this has nothing to do with Firestore. My apologies.)

[dsl101]

I posted a bug report to firebase-functions, as it showed up on upgrading, but I think it might be related to this one. I have an authUserOnCreate() trigger, that uses creationTime, and this is being passed in as undefined since firebase-tools 11.2.0 (I just ran the tests from 10.9.2 for each released tag, and 11.2.0 is where the error first shows up. Might it be related to this commit? See line 80 of src/emulator/auth/state.ts that was removed.