This is just an FYI of some trouble I ran into:

With 16,000 events over several years these following setting were causing the timeline to appear blank:

50 node limit setting in the view (translates to 50 event items, this limit was exhausted back in 2004, so the calendar appeared blank. Setting this to 0 (infinite) caused a memory overload. Adding the filter 'start year >= now eliminated my previous year issue. I assume I will encounter that memory issue again in June, so consider additional filters.

I also added filter: Node type = event. Prior to that it appeared to be drawing off the nodes or.... something.

So, now working fine in Drupal 5.5

Comments

asb’s picture

asb CreditAttribution: asb commented
Version: 5.x-1.x-dev » 6.x-3.x-dev
Category: support » feature
Status: Closed (fixed) » Active

This issue still exists in the current release: It's necessary to limit the items in the timeline to something like 50 or 100. There are lots of ways to accomplish that, e.g. by limiting the number of records, to make date fields relative to "now - 30 days", etc. After filtering and limiting you might end with a timeline that is able to display 50 dates with less than 1 minute loading time.

However, the purpose of a visualization is to visually compress time-related data if a another type of listing (e.g. a table) can not be read intuitively. Imho the need to narrow down the data sets to suchu small amounts makes the timeline module quite obsolete since such small numbers of dates would fit very well on a textual page display (e.g. with grouping by week and a three-column display I can accomlish a very well readable display for ~150 items that loads in a couple of seconds).

This module would make actually much more sense if it would allow to scroll through huge amounts of time-related data. It's the whole point of data visualization to go beyond spreadsheet-like limitation. So I think this is rather a feature request ;)

xamanu’s picture

xamanu CreditAttribution: xamanu commented
Title: Blank timeline possible cause » Scalability (Timeline with a lot of events)
Component: Configuration » Code
Assigned: Will Kirchheimer » Unassigned
Priority: Minor » Normal

Yes, I deeply agree and it is a problem of this module: The lack of scalability. There is no real mechanism on lazy loading events or so. We might want to think into a solution. This shouldn't be an easy task. Anybody has some good ideas?