OrigTime (FIX tag 42)

UTCTimestampFIX 4.4FIX 4.2

OrigTime (tag 42) is an UTCTimestamp field defined in FIX 4.4 and FIX 4.2. It appears in 2 message types, always optionally.

At a glance

Tag: 42
Name: OrigTime
Datatype: UTCTimestamp (String)
Format: YYYYMMDD-HH:MM:SS[.sss]
Dialects: FIX 4.4 and FIX 4.2
Messages: 2

What the specification says

Time of message origination (always expressed in UTC (Universal Time Coordinated, also known as "GMT"))

Descriptions are quoted from the FIX Orchestra sources under the Apache 2.0 licence.

A real message using tag 42

News · FIX 4.4

Tag	Field	Wire value	Meaning
8	BeginString	FIX.4.4
9	BodyLength	159
35	MsgType	B	News
49	SenderCompID	BOARTEAM
56	TargetCompID	COUNTERPARTY
34	MsgSeqNum	2
52	SendingTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
42	OrigTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
148	Headline	EXAMPLE
33	NoLinesOfText1 entry	1	repeating group
58	Text	Example message generated from the FIX dictionary.
10	CheckSum	109

Edit and decode it yourself

Shown with | separators for readability. On the wire FIX uses SOH (0x01), an invisible control byte — and because BodyLength and CheckSum are computed over the actual bytes, the two forms have different checksums. Both are valid and both decode here.

Open in the full decoder →

Generated from the FIX 4.4 dictionary and verified at build time: it parses and validates with no issues. Open the decoder to try your own message.

Where tag 42 appears

Requiredness is a property of the message, not of the field: the same tag can be optional in one message and conditionally required in another.

Message	MsgType	FIX 4.4	FIX 4.2	Where in the message
Email	C	Optional	Optional	directly on the message body
News	B	Optional	Optional	directly on the message body

Wire format

A UTC date and time. The fractional-seconds part is optional, so two timestamps can be equal but not byte-identical. @boarteam/fix keeps the value as a string; format rules are checked by validate(), which reports validate/invalid-value rather than throwing.

Read tag 42 in TypeScript

decode.tsts

import { createFixEngine } from "@boarteam/fix";import { dictionary } from "@boarteam/fix-dict-fix44";const fix = createFixEngine(dictionary);const { message, issues } = fix.parse(raw);const field = message.fields[42];field?.name;   // "OrigTime"field?.raw;    // the verbatim wire stringfield?.value;  // coerced to a string

Decode this in your own code

The same engine that produced the decoded example above is an Apache-2.0 npm package with zero runtime dependencies. It runs in Node and in the browser, and parse() returns problems as data instead of throwing.

npm i @boarteam/fix @boarteam/fix-dict-fix44

Try the decoder Source on GitHub