Extracting nice time intervals?

[curran]

In the case of aggregation over temporal bins, it would be great to have some way of extracting the interval from time.nice([count]). Given an approximate number of bins, I'd like to determine which time interval would yield closest to that number of bins. This is for creating a histogram with time as the X axis.

Perhaps there is already a way to do this, but I'm not seeing it. It's clear that the interval is computed internally (it looks like in tickInterval), but I don't see any way of extracting it through the API exposed.

Also looking at datalib's dl.bins.date, which seems to provide something similar.

[mbostock]

This is for creating a histogram with time as the X axis.

The recommended way of doing this is to pass the result of time.ticks to histogram.thresholds. That said, it’d make sense to expose ticks and tickStep (or perhaps tickInterval) methods in d3-time, just like the methods I recently added to d3-array.

[curran]

Thank you for considering this, I really appreciate it.

Passing the result into histogram.thresholds makes sense. But also, I'd like to use this functionality to drive a Crossfilter group, possibly "multidimensional histograms" using datalib, and maybe one day even server-side technology like Druid. I think for these cases it makes sense to be able to output the interval itself, such that it can be passed around between different technologies.

[mbostock]

Closing in favor of d3/d3-time#8.