Timelines

[tillprochaska]

We would like to enhance the timelines feature to solve a number of problems:

• Add temporal coverage metadata followthemoney#849
  Schemata that can be added to timelines are currently limited. Some of the schemata users frequently need in timelines (e.g. Company) can currently not be added to timelines. In order to be able to add other schemata to timelines, we need to add a new temporal extent feature to FtM.
• Simplify timelines UI/reuse UI elements #2629
  This will (eventually) lead to a more consistent UI (both implementation + UX) and simplify adding new entities to timelines.
• Add existing entities to timeliens (partially done)
  Many users already use network diagrams to map out entities and relationships, but would like to be able to view the same entities in a timeline visualization as well. When adding an item to a timeline, the form should suggest existing entities with matching schemata. When viewing entities in an investigation, users should also be able to (batch) add entities to a timeline (similar to how users can already add existing entities to a network diagram).
• Add timeline chart/Gantt-style visualization
  • Allow users to switch between timeline day/month/year zoom levels #2939
  • Enable chart view for all useres

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Bugs:

• There seems to be a bug with entity suggestions in timelines: When you focus an empty field, all entities are suggested, but once you start typing the list is emptied (even though there should be suggestions matching the input value). This isn’t actually related to the new timelines, but a general problem with prefix searches in Aleph: BUG: Prefix search doesn’t return all entities #2997

Possible future enhancements:

• General
  • When adding a new item, suggest existing entities while typing in caption field
  • Add optional description field to create dialog.
  • Format dates in a localized date format (e.g. Jan 22, 2023 instead of 2023-01-22).
  • Add timeline-scope search (list search results in sidebar, highlight search results, mute other items in list and chart view).
  • Up/down arrow keys shouldn’t scroll page
  • When creating a relationship entity and the source or target entity doesn’t yet exist, allow users to create a new entity inline
  • Decide whether to use startDate/date property depending on presence of endDate field
  • Handle entities with only an end date in the same way as entities with only a start date?
  • Increase width of sidebar on larger screens (or let users adjust width)
• List view
  • List entity set items without dates or with weird dates that couldn’t be parsed
  • Add action card to create a new timeline on investigations homepage (similar to network diagrams)
    correctly.
  • Allow sorting by date, start date, end date, in ascending/descending order
  • Optionally render the property of the description field (and other featured properties?) in list view (consider adding a compact/detailed view option)
  • Automatically focus new/selected items, scroll into view
• Chart view
  • Disable day, month views for timelines covering very long time ranges as they could cause performance issues.
  • Double-click anywhere to add a new timeline item (with the date prefilled)
  • Consider displaying items with only a start date as ongoing (or make this a per-item toggle).
  • Display the start date, end date in chart view (maybe add an optional compact/detailed view option)
  • Scrolling horizontally is difficult when using a mouse/scroll wheel.
  • Display a small hint that you can use Shift + Scroll to scroll horizontally on macOS.