Importing from Aeon Timeline 2

I have not found anything regarding on how to import/export from/to aeon timeline 2, an awesome timeline software which I used to create a chronology of thing I’m writing at the moment. There’s a project for Aeon Timeline 1 on github it seems and there is this discussion in the old forums regarding aeon timeline 1.

Any ideas on how to go about this?

Here’s Aeon’s page on preparing data for import: https://www.aeontimeline.com/support/importing/. If you haven’t don’t this already, you’ll want to read the Tinderbox help on HTML export.

This should be fairly straightforward, though of course much depends on your particular data. For a simple case, the export template

^value($Name)[tab]^value($StartDate,“l”)[return]

would export an item’s name and start date. (I don’t see that the Aeon Page tells us what date format to use, so I’m guessing here.)

If the template above were named TimelineItem, a container could then export a table for each child

^children(/Templates/TimelineItem)

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There’s a chick-and-egg problem here as Tinderbox doesn’t know what AT2 might want and AT2 doesn’t know what Tinderbox can provide. So, there no ‘just do it’ setting to lean on. During the AT2 beta, in which I participated, I think we (testers) identified a number of import formatting issues that were since fixed.

I’ve just been looking at AT2 and I think the most sensible idea is to to make a small AT2 file with 3-4 specimen events with all the metadata (customisations) you want. Then export it. Now import it back into a new AT@ file, which will show you the degree of fidelity you and expect for inter-app use. Rinse and repeat as needed until you’re happy the export CSV or tab-delim file has everything you need. That file is now the ‘template’ for designing your TB export templates and export configuration to re-create the data.

That’s all less work than perhaps the paragraph above might imply. However, if you don’t feel confident with the TB export end of things then post your CSV here (perhaps in a thread of its own and we can help figure out the moving parts. Some experimentation will be required as AT2 import dialog is only lightly documented).

Import to TB should be easier. See my article on tab-delim/CSV import. Tip, if you pre-make any new user attributes needed, and set their data type rather than let TB auto-create them, you should avoid possible issues where TB has insufficient data to guess the desired data type (e.g. string vs. number, or need for a boolean, etc.). AT2 doesn’t document its date formats for input/output, so the above experiment should help figure out the format(s) needed. Tinderbox should be able to create the date formats AT2 needs, and in most cases I’d imagine Tinderbox will correctly parse AT2-generated dates; if not some date-re-formatting may need to be done in a text editor between export and import. Only actual testing will reveal the status quo.

I hope that helps.

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I’ll take a look at what aeon timeline 2 can provide and what tinderbox can do with it. Thanks for your suggestions!

Aeon has released an iOS version, now.

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