In my continuing exploration of using Tinderbox for things it was never intended to be used for, I’m curious about the viability of nesting Timelines. And yes, I’m acutely aware that’s not the direction Tinderbox is headed in, nor a feature in much demand.
Timeline views can ingest descendant nodes, which is a great feature for organising data. However, all data within a timeline band is flattened together, and laid out according to Tindebox’s internal decision-making process.
I’m wondering if it could be at all possible to preserve the grouping? As the TimelineBand refers to the top-level property of the view (ignoring any nested timelines, from my brief tests), could Timeline bands group elements by parent if in a nested group? It can get quite messy keeping consistent with Timeline band numbers and names, and this approach would seem to fit Tinderbox’s data exploratory spirit.
(I’m also realising this isn’t fundamentally what Tinderbox is for, and if maybe someone’s already rigged a JavaScript solution I can ingest the hierarchy into for a poster view? I’d naturally prefer to keep everything TB native. I think a lot more could be done with the timeline view, but there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of discussion around it, suggesting I’m on my own!)
Sounds like you want to meet the child of Timeline view and Chart view. Drilling into the timeline would be interesting and useful for many categories of note taking.
Says who? I think your suggestion is very much at the core of what Tinderbox “is for”, although the “is for” of Tinderbox is and should always remain undefined, IMO.
There’s a few inconsistencies in Timeline view that aren’t obvious until you start tugging at the seams. The bands are great, but when you’re pulling nested nodes with their own band definition, it starts to rupture - you can see this was once a neat idea for something one level deep, but someone asked to promote nested nodes into the view, and the idea about bands may have been overlooked. I can also see it being an absolute development can of worms with payoff of low demand.
VisJS has a nice timeline library, which I may end up calling on, if I can work out a sane way of munging data into it. It handles nested timeline grouping, though right now my head is looking for the path of least resistance (and documentation reading).
The Timeline view options panel has an option to include or exclude descendants. Also a parent note in the Timeline can be selected and the “open in new tab” command invoked, to view the parent and descendants.
