As discussed in the Range Filtering section of the Using Cartridges chapter, range filters are applied to records returned by MDEX queries for products or SKUs. These range filters exclude products and SKUs whose startDate property is in the future or whose endDate property is in the past.

The startDate and endDate properties are null on all products and SKUs included in Commerce Reference Store, so the corresponding records will not be filtered out unless you set these properties. In the MDEX, however, these properties must have values that can be used in the range filters for comparison to the current date. Therefore, the XML definition file of the ProductCatalogOutputConfig component specifies, for these properties, defaults to use in the MDEX in place of null values:

<property name="startDate" default-value="0" type="date"/>
<property name="endDate" default-value="32506394714894" type="date"/>

The startDate default (0) represents January 1, 1970, and the endDate default (32506394714894) represents January 1, 3000. Using these values as defaults ensures that products and SKUs with null startDate and endDate properties will not be filtered out.