Refactor the Timeline to meet coding standards.

[mramato]

The Timeline widget is awesome and people love it; however, it's some of the oldest UI code in Cesium and is radically different than the rest of the code base. We need to bring it up to snuff so that it meets our coding standards. There are also additional features we would like to add but cannot do so until we have a way to validate and

• - Refactor to use Knockout and view models and meet general coding standards.
• - Document the API (there is currently no entry at all in the built Documentation)
• - Add specs (we currently don't have any)]

Related issues: #773, #1768, #2066, #3555

[mramato]

What's the plan here? We obviously don't have enough time for a full re-write before 1.0; but should we just pretty up what we have with knockout and documentation? Or do we just keep what we have and have a breaking change isolated to Timeline when we do the rewrite?

[pjcozzi]

I'm open to anything, but perhaps we push the whole thing unless @emackey has time to do knockout/doc before 1.0.

[pjcozzi]

Any update? Are we pushing this?

[mramato]

I think the consensus is to push it and just make it a full-on breaking change later; however we should probably add at least basic doc stating as much. I'll take a stab at it tomorrow and push this after I open the pull.

[mramato]

I opened the above PR with very basic doc; but otherwise I'm moving this to push.

[pjcozzi]

+1

[mramato]

Some discussion on the fourm

[WarpDrive]

Thanks Matt. There's also an issue with mousewheel: when you can scroll the page Cesium is on, you can't mousewheel the timeline because the page scrolling moves the timeline away from the pointer, and the pointer needs to be hovering over the element to register mousewheel (for keyboard events only focus is needed, not hover over.) So when the timeline is hovered over page scrolling should be disabled (which seems to already be the case for the 3D canvas.)

[td-edge]

+1

A standalone application would be ideal...

[hpinkos]

idea from the forum: add a way to select the current date/time by typing it in or pick from a calendar instead of having to use the slider

[td-edge]

@hpinkos I had the same issue and used bootstrap's datepicker to create a solution:

var start_julian = clock.startTime;
var end_julian = clock.stopTime;

$("#start-datepicker").datepicker({
    onSelect: function(dateText, inst) {
        var dateAsObject = $(this).datepicker( 'getDate' ); //the getDate method
        start_julian = new Cesium.JulianDate.fromDate(dateAsObject);
        clock.startTime = start_julian;
        clock.currentTime = start_julian;
        timeline.zoomTo(start_julian, end_julian);
    }
});

$("#end-datepicker").datepicker({
    onSelect: function(dateText, inst) {
        var dateAsObject = $(this).datepicker( 'getDate' ); //the getDate method
        end_julian = new Cesium.JulianDate.fromDate(dateAsObject);
        clock.stopTime = end_julian;
        timeline.zoomTo(start_julian, end_julian);
    }
});

[jjhembd]

This is unlikely to be a priority anytime soon. If someone does want to address it, something along the lines of #10876 would be more in line with current coding standards.
Tracking this isn't particularly useful because of its low priority, so I will close it.
Thanks!