Required and time fields

Required fields and time fields solve different problems. A required field controls whether a record can be accepted. A time field controls the timestamp used for time-based analytics and storage behavior.

Required fields#

Set Required (Ingest) to Yes only when every valid sender must provide that field.

Required validation happens before the event enters the spool. If a required value is missing, the runtime rejects the request rather than accepting a record that cannot satisfy the model contract.

Optional fields may be absent or null where the destination supports the resulting nullable value.

The time field#

Select one timestamp field as the model's time field. Common names are occurred_at, event_time, or created_at.

Use the time at which the business event happened, not the time at which your application happened to upload a batch, when that distinction matters.

{
  "occurred_at": "2026-08-02T12:00:00Z",
  "account_id": "acct_123"
}

Automatic ingest-time fallback#

If a model has no timestamp field, ReportPlane adds a nullable system timestamp field for ingestion time. The preferred key is ingest_time; if that name is already occupied, a safe numbered variant such as ingest_time_2 is used.

This backend-generated fallback does not count against the user field quota.

Editing required rules#

Changing a field from optional to required affects new ingest acceptance. Records already accepted into the durable spool are not rejected later only because this flag changed before dispatch.