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Question: How to start with building a timeline interface (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/webdev

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Hi,

I'm rather new to web development. For my local scouts troop I'm currently trying to build a webapp to show a big browsable timeline of the troops chronicles (We have many big folders of paper showing what the scouts did that year). I've already build the ground structure based on Django for the backend and vue for the frontend. And I can display the individual elements of the chronicles (Writings, articles, pictures; videos and audio for newer entries) in a list.

Now I want to create a component, that will display a horizontal timeline with the ability to move and zoom, showing elements depending on the zoom level with different level of detail. I want to make it easy to browse the timeline of over 70 years with entries per year (like 30 elements per year).

I already tried timeline-js, but it doesn't quite behave like I want it to be (zooming, different levels of detail,...). For me it seems, that it cannot really be customized enough to reach my goal (though I might be wrong about that).

Then I thought about building that timeline component myself, though I don't know where to start in building such a component (how to draw the timeline itself with its markings, how to draw the elements at the correct position,...)

Can you give me a hint/direction where I should look for a solution? Maybe you know a tutorial for a similar situation (creating your own complex UI components)?

Thanks in advance for your help! Currently I feel like I don't know enough to ask the correct question to a search engine for a solution.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you explain a bit more about "zooming, different levels of detail" you mention? Maybe break them down to separate issue you are having with the library, what does it do, what do you want that it's not doing. If there is a way to tweak it then you don't have to build the component from scratch.

But if you already abandoned the idea of tweaking timeline-js then you can have full control in vue, have to build it yourself though. Start by breaking the functionality of the timeline into separate interaction. From a quick look, timeline-js just make style attribute reactive. Have a box? good. Now put really long div in it with placeholder texture. Can you drag/scroll it? no? grab a suitable function from vueuse and make it scrollable. Follow with markers, zoom, dummy event items, data fetching (the actual width, marker spacing, events placement can be calculated from timestamp in json after this step), lazy loading, styling, animation, so on.

I don't know how much experience do you have with each things required (html, css, js, vue) so it is a bit difficult to give useful answer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With TimelineJS I first tried with title-only entries. If you zoom out the entries get compresses along the time axis of course. Either they are overlapping, which looks bad and is not useful for the interaction, or you can let TimelineJS stack them. But then they stack higher and higher, overflowing the height of the timeline. A good vertical scrolling mechanism doesn't seem to be a feature (like seeing at what vertical postion you currently are).

I thought about, what I want to try. I want each entry represented by a bubble, connected to the timeline with a vertical line. The size of the bubble should change depending on how much space is available. Shrinking to a small point at minimum, growing to accomodate a small image and maybe a title (for that morphing to a rounded rectangle would be better).

Maybe this is possible with clever CSS styling of timelinejs. CSS is really a weak part for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Your bubble idea could work and you will have to be comfortable with css, no way around it I guess.
I see vis.js have a lot of timeline examples you might be able to adapt to your need.