5

Gantt Chart Improvements


A
EmiViolet

Hello! I would love to see some improvements made to the Gantt chart. Some of the issues may be buggy behavior, as I'm not sure they were intended.

- Event details on hover:
Currently, whenever you mouse over an event in the chart, it brings up the bubble with more info. The problem is that this happens when simply moving through the chart, at which point the bubble will be frozen in place, and the only way to remove it seems to be via repeated clicks on empty space or passing over another element, allowing the mouse to hover there a moment, and then moving away.

- Event ordering:
Events appear to be ordered solely based on the time of the element's creation, leading to the existence of large vertical spaces between events on the same date if when one is created after other events were created on different dates. Moving the elements positioning in the timeline sidebar doesn't change this, and there is no way to reorganize elements within the chart itself. I actually tried using the act, chapter, scene, and beat attributes on event element pages, but this also had no effect. It would nice if those attributes did have an effect on their organization, but just having the ability to move elements in the Gantt chart would go a long way to resolving the issue.

- Section improvements:
Sections can currently have date ranges and colors applied, but they could be improved. When multiple sections have overlapping dates, they reorder themselves vertically. Like events, there appears to be no means of altering their order. Being able to move them would fix this, plus allow the sections to be placed between events, rather than cement them at the foot of the chart. Keeping them at the foot becomes a problem once enough events have been added that the chart becomes scroll-able, thus hiding the sections from sight unless you scroll down.
As for section dates and automatic sizing, say you have a section with a date range ending on day 3 and another with range beginning on day 4. This leaves a large horizontal gap in between the two sections and any events occurring on day 3 don't appear to be within section one. This makes it necessary to set the end date of one section to the start date of the next for proper coverage, which feels odd. But doing this also forces the second section down to a new row, which may or may not be desired. Having a section extend through its end date would resolve this.
Finally, the colors. They are great for distinguishing between section elements themselves, but do little else for the chart. It would be helpful if applying a color created a color overlay on the chart background, thus making it easy to see when events fall in a section's range. In cases where sections overlap, it would be a matter of layering and the user could decide which section's color is used.

This is a lot, I know, but I like the concept of the Gantt chart and it would be great to see it refined.

A