Creation time guessed from ObjectID

[heruan]

I noticed that the document's creation time displayed is guessed in Genghis by parsing the ObjectID, since a default MongoDB ObjectID has the first 4 bytes representing the timestamp the ObjectID was created at.
It may be a nice feature, but one can use custom values in ObjectIDs resulting in awkward dates displayed in Genghis:

Genghis
2 documents
==========
7b694dc93a35bb44f4d31124 Sun, 12 Aug 2035 02:32:41 GMT
{
  _id: ObjectId("7b694dc93a35bb44f4d31124"),
  ...
}
0862b01e825494dc728b437e Mon, 17 Jun 1974 07:15:42 GMT
{
  _id: ObjectId("0862b01e825494dc728b437e"),
  ...
}

Can this behaviour be disabled in cases where the guess would be wrong?

[bobthecow]

Yep, this is weird. I'd like to support this use case, but I'd also love to avoid adding a setting to support it, so what would be a reasonable heuristic for deciding whether to show a creation timestamp?

[bobthecow]

Here's the heuristic I settled on:

• Only guess creation date if all documents in the current page of the current collection which have ObjectIds as their _id also have "sane" ObjectId timestamps
• A "sane" ObjectId timestamp is a timestamp timestamp created from the first four bytes of the ObjectId which is before 48 hours from now (leaving some room for time zones and server timestamp craziness?) and after the release of Mongo v1.0.

This change has been committed to develop and will be in the next release!