Problems setting large width of group

[Trevor DeVore]

On 8/2/03 Dar Scott wrote

>On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:42 PM, Trevor DeVore wrote:
>
>> I have a Timeline that is a group made up of fields and buttons which  
>> is generated from a databse.  I just ran into a situation where the  
>> group size is set to 1 when the trying to set the width to a large  
>> number (60,000 pixels in this case).  In my code I set the width of  
>> the group to the formattedWidth of the group.  The formattedWidth is  
>> returned correctly but the group width is set to 1.
>
>I saw your (excellent) bug report.
>
>A workaround might be to maintain objects within some range of the  
>current time position (window in a generic sense).  As the user scrolls  
>to one direction (somehow), objects are created in that direction and  
>are deleted off the other end.  This means you need to keep the  
>database around or an equivalent.  This might create a faster initial  
>response if you were creating this at the start each time the stack is  
>opened.  This does not need to be on an individual object basis, but at  
>whatever logical level is convenient.  Some decorative graphics might  
>be reused.

Thanks for the input Dar.  The current design allows the user to use a scroll bar to move through the entire timeline.  If the program needs to jump to a ceratin point in the timeline it scrolls to that point automatically.  I don't know that creating fields dynamically as the user scrolled would be as responsive as I would like.

>Another might be to make a 2D timeline.
>
>Another might be to switch to cards.
>
>Switch to a vertical timeline and use very short fields?

Unfortunately the UI is locked in place for the timeline so I can't make any changes to it at this point.

In the program the timeline is going to be generated and cached until the program sees that any timeline events have been added to the database.  What I think I am going to do is monitor the width of the group of fields as it is created checking that its width remains <= 32767.  Once it reaches this threshold I will start a new group.  I will then just change my slider code, etc. to move all groups that were created.  Hopefully this will work without a hitch.

-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com