Background

The currently proposed way of handlig time in EdgeOne is based on Sapient. Many users find it very confusing and also the developers have problems to implement requirements properly. 

Current state

• The UI is designed to present one Board with multiple Boardlets. Boardlets are split into two groups:
  1. Boardlets for data entry. (e.g. Forms)
  2. Boardlets for data aggregation and analysis. (e.g. Tables, Charts.)
• Each Boardlet (especially type 2) can be set to a timespan. The time span can be defined in two ways:
  1. Absolute time span. (e.g. 1.1.2019 - 31.12.2019 )  -  The time is fixed here.
  2. Relative time span. (e.g. Last Shift, Last Week, Current Year, Previous Month, etc... )
• A Boardlet is able to inherit its time setting from the Board (or other parent), BUT it doen't have to. It can ignore the setting from 'above' and override it.
• Moreover a user is able to change the time span of the board. (global time).

All this leads to confusing states in the user interface and many complex questions:

• One has to explore the configuration of the Board and all Boardlets
• How do we store the changes made by the end user? For that reason Sapient introduces UserViews where such settings are stored. But that causes immense complexity (e.g. do we update such settings, when some other user changes the config on the Board)
• There are too many options on different levels to deal with time settings. 

Data for decision support

The proposal is to remove complexity by introducing rules which limit the options and thus simplifying the whole mechanism.

1. The global time setting will only allow to set one point in time (e.g. Now, Yesterday 12:00 or 1/1/2019 0:00 ) this can be labled with aliases of course
2. Boarlets do have a relative time setting relative to the global time . (e.g. Last Week - would mean: GlobalTime minus 7 days until GlobalTime")

Such rules will have the effect that one can "time travel" with the whole board by changing the global time, therefore I'll suggest using this as the name for the feature.

Of course it should be possible to easily switch the local time temporarly inside the analysis boardlets (eg. switching month back and forth with arrows   " (<)  November  (>) " )

Options considered

FAQ

Q1.

A1.

References

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