Collapse empty timline areas

[Christof]

This is a feature request from our client.

We are generating gantt diagrams for multi-year projects, thus our diagrams are quite large. It would be very helpful for us to display only relevant data if empty timeline columns could be collapsed.

Consider the two example screenshots attached:

1. The project actually starts on 18.10.2012, but since I have chosen the "year" view, it displays the first 9 months on the year as well. This also applies when you have a date early in the next year, e.g. 10.01.2016, where the entire year of 2016 would be show
2. Between the third milestone and the one displayed on the screenshot are 7 months where nothing happened in the project

I envision this could be solved nicely by introducing a setting in the "views" property defining a threshold after which the date cols should be collapsed. By putting it in the "views" section, it would work regardless of the view.

Example:

views: [
  {
    type: 'month',
    slotSize: 56,
    // in month view, this would mean 4 weeks
    collapseColumnThreshold: 4,
    collapseColumnTemplate: '...'
  },
  {
    type: 'year',
    slotSize: 50,
    // in year view, this would mean 2 months
    collapseThreshold: 2,
    collapseColumnTemplate: "#= kendo.toString(collapseStart, 'MMM') + ' - ' + kendo.toString(collapseEnd, 'MMM') #"
  }
],​

[Christof]

(I couldn't add text after the code block and my ordered list regarding the screenshots is not displayed with numbers)

Anyways this feature would be very helpful especially when printing the diagrams.

Thank you for considering this.

[Dimitar Terziev]

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your feedback on the matter. In general there is a similar functionality already implemented, which hides the weekends leaving only the work days.

What seems a drawback in the proposed functionality is the fact that when the user moves a tasks across the timeline, the next/previous available slots might be after a large period of time.

Regards,
Dimitar Terziev
Telerik

 

 

[Christof]

Hi Dimitar

Thanks for your response.

I am already only showing work days. Over the course of 7 months, that isn't quite enough however.

We are using the gantt read-only, so that wouldn't be a problem for us. You could always "undo" that view when editing the gantt to get around that.

Is this feature something that might be considered or what may I tell my client :)?

Thanks again.

Christof

[Dimitar Terziev]

Hello Christof,

We shall consider implementing functionality to control the timeslot ranges in the timeline part of the gantt. As a temporary solution you could implement a custom view where only the timeslots containing gantt tasks are shown. We have a how-to section in our documentation, which you could use as a reference.

Regards,
Dimitar Terziev
Telerik