Timeline plugin

This is my first post, so take my appologees if I make mistakes here. I have been using Xojo for 4 years now and am extremely happy with it. For a new project I would need to show data ordered by date in a timeline, that can be zoomed in and out from years to actually days. I was looking for a plugin that could help me with that, but dwas unsuccessful to find one. Before I start developping one on my own, I just wanted to ask you all, if anybody had worked on such a project alreday and would share his/her experience with me.

I would also like to thank so many of you who have contributed to this forum - the knowledge here is a treasure that has helped me through the past years, beeing non-professional in coding.

all of us are thankful for those of us that help others on the forums. WIthout that help many of us would have failed over the years. it is just one aspect of a very good community around Xojo.

And now that you have broken into the forums, please be a regular.
—sb

I don’t know of any 3rd party controls so no luck there. I worked on a timeline for some legal software a number of years ago but I can’t share that code even if I still had it.

If I recall correctly, It wasn’t terribly hard to do. I created an events class that had all the details of the event. I created a canvas subclass that had an array of these events and start/end dates to the timeline, tick marks etc. The canvas responded to double click (edit) and drag events (tweak placement). If memory serves the only tricky part was the line from the event to the timeline (because it wasn’t always a straight line).

I know this isn’t real helpful other than to be able to tell you that it can be done in Xojo and it’s not awfully hard. I would say work on it incrementally. Get A working to your satisfaction before starting on B and so on.

Thanks a lot so far - a least it can be done.

you can do almost anything in xojo (and without plugin) it just takes more or less time !

You could a Javascript based solution in a HtmlViewer. Admittedly, this is a bit perverse. See for instance here: https://bashooka.com/coding/javascript-timeline-libraries/

I’ve found htmlviewer solutions work really well as long as you make sure they don’t behave weirdly in some particular scenarios. The typical issue that “breaks the illusion” is that the content scrolls by mistake when using a magic trackpad or mouse, or when used in touchscreens. Having a part of a window scroll inside an invisible container is jarring. If this part is controlled (using the proper css and head meta tags) it should be transparent.

There was another common issue in the past but I think it’s solved these days: htmlviewers used to have different antialiasing for fonts and different image resizing algorithms, to their contents would sometimes look slightly different than other parts of the window.

The potential overhead of an htmlviewer may be unacceptable for some, though. I try to use them a lot myself, especially nowadays that there are so many nice pre-built solutions out there.

[quote=417372:@Michael Nogler]This is my first post, so take my appologees if I make mistakes here. I have been using Xojo for 4 years now and am extremely happy with it. For a new project I would need to show data ordered by date in a timeline, that can be zoomed in and out from years to actually days. I was looking for a plugin that could help me with that, but dwas unsuccessful to find one. Before I start developping one on my own, I just wanted to ask you all, if anybody had worked on such a project alreday and would share his/her experience with me.

I would also like to thank so many of you who have contributed to this forum - the knowledge here is a treasure that has helped me through the past years, beeing non-professional in coding.[/quote]
It would be helpful to have a picture showing what you are looking for. Beatrix’ link shows how different peoples opinions of “timeline” can be conceived.

Perhaps you could check with @Jeremie Leroy. On his site, there is a mention that he is planning to add a timeline functionality to his chartview plugin.

if you like charts, maybe you check the MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin?
Maybe one of the 200 example projects does what you need.

I think the Gantt charts in the ChartDirector Plugin might be what you are after.
Here’s a link to their Gantt gallery

Thanks all of you again - I will have a closer look to chartDirector Plugin - seems close to what I want.

I have played around a little bit with your proposals. Beatrix’ advise was great and simple to get it working. So I eventually went with this one. I am using the SIMILE timeline in htmlviewer and it looks really very nice.

Thanks a lot Beatrix