Make Records Public

When records are created, they are private by default. Private records are not accessible without the use of a protocol or permissions. To make a record publicly available, the record must be published.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to publish a record.

Publish a record upon creation

To publish a record, you must explicitly declare that record as published by setting the published attribute to true when creating it:

const {record} = await web5.dwn.records.create({
    data: "a published record",
    message: {
      dataFormat: "text/plain",
      published: true
    }
  });

Publishing records in the future

When specifying to publish a record without providing the datePublished attribute, the record will be published now (the same date it was created). However, it's also possible to publish a record in the future by providing a future date for the datePublished attribute:

// Create a new Date instance for tomorrow
const today = new Date();
const tomorrow = new Date(today);
tomorrow.setDate(today.getDate() + 1);

// Format the date and time in YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.ssssssZ format
const formattedDate = tomorrow.toISOString().replace(/\.\d{3}Z$/, '.000000Z');

// Create a record today to be published tomorrow
const { record } = await web5.dwn.records.create({
  data: "This record will be created now and published tomorrow",
  message: {
    dataFormat: "text/plain",
    published: true,
    datePublished: formattedDate
  },
});

info

The datePublished value must be in ISO 8601 standard format for representing dates and times. It must be expressed in the 'YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.ssssssZ' format, where YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the 2-digit month, DD is the 2-digit day, T is a separator, hh is the 2-digit hour in 24-hour format, mm is the 2-digit minute, ss.ssssss is the 2-digit second with microsecond precision of 6, and Z indicates the time is in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).