Resolve dates being {} when updating "\"[object Object]\" is not a valid date."

[alexander-chi]

Afternoon all!

I'm not sure where the best place to post this is but I figured it would be helpful for anyone else who encountered this issue.

When updating a document with partial properties, any dates in the document to be merged where coming through as {}. This caused validation errors whenever you tried to update a document.

{
    "errors": [
        {
            "name": "ValidationError",
            "data": [
                {
                    "field": "updatedAt",
                    "message": "\"[object Object]\" is not a valid date."
                },
                {
                    "field": "createdAt",
                    "message": "\"[object Object]\" is not a valid date."
                }
            ],
            "message": "The following fields are invalid: updatedAt, createdAt"
        }
    ]
}

I could not replicate it in the community template or on a fresh install. After spending several hours on it, I started crawling through the package-lock.json and comparing dependencies.

The culprit in our case was @types/pg, we had 8.11.5 listed as a dependency which has a dependency of pg-types 4.x.x which in turn depends on postgres-date 2.x.x.

postgres-date 2.x.x is incompatible with the 1.x.x version required by the dependency chain @payloadcms/db-postgres -> pg 8.11.3 -> pg-types 2.1.0 -> postgres-date 1.0.4

I'm unsure how this occurred and how to prevent it from occurring in the future however adding "pg-types": "2.2.0" as an explicit dependency resolved it for us.

Hope this helps anyone else facing this issue!