Time Slider Widget

[TristanKnowlton]

Does anyone have any tips on the time slider widget configuration for the Flex Viewer?  ESRI's so called documentation doesn't help.

Thanks!

[BrianOevermann]

Darryl,

What, specifically, are you needing info on?  I just wired up the annexation history for our city as a time slider demo in the Flex Viewer 2.2.  My first attempt but I am now thinking of the possibilities with some of our other data.  I'm not sure if I have the answers you need but I can take a stab at it.

[TristanKnowlton]

Basically I can't get it to run.  Here is a  screen shot of my rest end point for the data layer and the .xml for the Time Widget.  I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.  My data is in the format of YYYY/MM/DD.

If you have any suggestions, that would be great.  Thanks!

[BrianOevermann]

Darryl,

Maybe I simply had "beginner's luck", but before starting the configuration of the time slider I read through the time slider widget help located at:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapps/flexviewer/help/index.html

According to your config file, your date format is set to display as "March, 2011" but your data interval is by day.  That could be your issue.  The help page for the widget has a link under the <dateformat> tag that covers the syntax for accepted values.

I am attaching my timeslider.xml config file as an example, the time excerpt from the REST service listing for the map service being used, and the time properties dialog from the map service .mxd in the hopes that comparing a successful implementation of the widget to your situation is possible.

If you look closely you will find that my annexation history starts in 1892 but the time slider is set up to start in 1950.  I initially set the widget up to run at a 1 month interval, but our city had no annexations between the initial townsite and 1954.  The widget starts by displaying whatever the start time entry is (or likely whatever "stuff" precedes the time you set up, but I didn't test that scenario), so rather than make the user wait "for years (simulated, of course)" I narrowed the time on the slider.

You will also notice that the map service shows the interval to be 6 years even though the widget runs with an interval of every 6 months.  For some reason the layer properties dialog got reset to the 6 year value even though I initially specified a 1 month interval.  Maybe that was because of the overall span of time in my data layer?  It doesn't seem to affect the use of the widget, however.

Also, I initially had the <thumbmovingrate> tag set to 100 milliseconds to move the 1 month interval along rapidly, but I found that the map server cannot process and push images to the client that quickly.  I found that once I paused the slider my annexation polygons would show up in one huge lump instead of "as they were annexed".  I ended up changing the interval to every 6 months and the rate to half a second (500 milliseconds).  The rate is the key to allowing your server to keep up with the pushes to the client, but without my bumping the interval up the whole time series would take 5-10 minutes to run--users would fall asleep or move on to something else.

Keep in mind that my showing annexation history really is just a demo/proof of concept.  It is cool to see how parts of the city got annexed, but it isn't as useful as, say, traffic counts or water levels in streams.

Hope this helps you and others.

[TristanKnowlton]

Brian,

Thanks for your help.  Unfortunately nothing seems to work for me.  I think I've tried every combination in the config file and nothing works.  I'm not sure what else to do here.  Very frustrating.