Item10184: Suggestions for the EasyTimelinePlugin

I've been working a lot with the EasyTimelinePlugin last week to realize dynamic overviews over Projects. It makes use of both Topic metadata and the ActionTrackerPlugin. Actually, i think the EasyTimelinePlugin is a great tool for that but it has some issues which urges the programmer to use lots and lots of workarround to make it stable and usefull for dynamic data.

The major points which in my opinion would greatly improve this plugin are:

1. An auto funktion for the Period. Should just go though all dates in the text and take the first and last as settings for from: till: . Currently you need to go there using lots of nested expressions outside the Timeline code.
2. Kind of related to the first: Don't crash if a date is outside the Period. Simply ignore it or set it to max/min.
3. More label options for the Time Axis. Label for monthes and days. Currently you can specify month for the scale and also increment:1 but it does only label years, not monthes or days. A workarround for this is very complex in TML if the period, start stop and scale are dynamic. Also the notation for the year "2010.37" is not really usefull.
4. Simply ignore a bar/barset if no entry is specified. Currently it crashes if you specify a bar in BarData and then don't make at least one line with a date/dateset in the PlotData. Same for the LineData
5. Don't crash if there is a syntax error in a PlotData/LineData line. Just ignore the line. For example if a date is in a wrong syntax.
6. An option/setting to delete the .gif files from time to time or limit them to a number.

Hope i did not miss an option and the suggestions are all accurate?

I tried to get myself into the perl module and do some enhancements but it's more complicated than i thought. I guess you are 100times faster Andrew!

Kind Regards, Enrik

-- EnrikGuenter - 21 Dec 2010

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