Introduce a new item that has two start and two end times.

[mcshaman]

I have been using Timeline to map out future projects and events. Unfortunately we are not one hundred percent sure when these events will start or finish. When mapping out the timelines manually (using design software) we indicate an earliest start and a latest end. It would be great if Timeline offered this flexibility. I have mocked up an example.

[mdxs]

Guess that you're looking for something like this http://www.simile-widgets.org/wiki/Timeline_Event_Display#Timeline_Event_Display (which is part of the Simile Timeline widget).

[myrises]

it is possible with current version too, i think.
look at http://visjs.org/examples/timeline/25_background_areas.html
you can using background type item for earliest start and a latest end, then setup "item4" as range type. both item must has a same group too. other nuances may be resolved by playing with their items style properties (position, color, etc).

additionly, look at http://visjs.org/examples/timeline/30_subgroups.html and http://visjs.org/examples/timeline/31_background_areas_with_groups.html

[AlexDM0]

@knyazhe1 is right BUT you'll need to do manual stacking and use subgroups. It would be cool if there was a type as you describe it though. We can look into it.

Regards,

Alex

[mdxs]

The SIMILE-Timeline code is on Github at https://github.com/simile-widgets/timeline but it seems commits stopped on 2013-11-06 (it is BSD-licensed AFAIK, so adoption of ideas/docs/code should be possible... but I'm not a lawyer).

[josdejong]

I think we can implement this as a new item type, derived from the built in RangeItem (similar to how BackgroundItem extends RangeItem).

Easiest would be to take the regular start and end as properties for the outer start and end, and add two new properties like say innerStart and innerEnd to denote the start/end of the inner. That should be relatively straigtforward I think. If we would not use the regular start and end properties I think we need to do some changes in the Timeline itself too, add some abstraction there (i.e. every type of item must get methods getStart and getEnd instead of reading the properties directly, so you can map them to a property of your choice).

[myrises]

@josdejong commented:

we can implement this as a new item type, derived from the built in RangeItem (similar to how BackgroundItem extends RangeItem).

how to do it in the right way? without any original sources conflict.
i think, need make a single module (customitem.js) for new CustomItem type and export it to... somewhere ⁉️ then rebuild vis-custom.js and vis-custom.min.js. right? 😳

[myrises]

ok, it seems in the library there will be many changes and new features. other words,
to create the modules is still too early, i think. look at http://jsfiddle.net/knyzhe1/zn673Lz0/
this is visualization of dependencies between timeline modules. some parts are unused at now. need to wait a bit. especially the navigation bar.

[josdejong]

Suppose you use start and end for the outer dates, and use new properties innerStart and innerEnd for the inner dates, there should be no need to adjust the vis.js library itself: you can load vis.js in the browser, then load the file with your CustomItem. This CustomItem should register itself at vis.timeline.components.ItemSet.types.

If you want to extend vis.js with this new CustomItem, you will indeed have to rebuild the library as described in the readme. Easiest is to check out where for example BackgroundItem is referenced/used/exported and do the same for your new CustomItem. vis.js uses commonjs modules.

[mcshaman]

Great Josdejong. Thanks very much for that. I will give it a go and let you know how it goes.

[AlexDM0]

Hi,

Over the last year a lot of feature requests have been made. We have just introduced our new website which has a list of the requested features. We have placed this request on that list.

The list can be found here:
http://visjs.org/featureRequests.html

An explaination of the new system can be found here:
http://visjs.org/blog.html#New\ website\ for\ vis.js!

I would like to stress that this does not mean we abandon this request. Discussion here will continue if needed on this feature but we will close it to keep our Github issue page more of a bug-todo list.

Future feature requests will still be made here and then added to the website by us.

Regards,

Alex

[mojoaxel]

Reopening as Feature-Request issue (see #2114).
Everybody: Please feel free to implement this!

[mojoaxel]

@yotamberk created in #2519 a new example expectedVsActualTimesItems to demonstrate something like this.