Timeline Controls

McIDAS-V makes use of a timeline widget in a variety of areas. The timeline allows you to see the temporal distribution of a set of times and easily select them. There can also be a date selection mechanism (see below) that allows you to select based on a range, interval, etc.

Image 1: Absolute Times Chooser

Date Selection

The date selection settings can be accessed by right-clicking in the timeline to show a popup menu. The menu allows you explicitly define these settings through a Properties dialog or set them directly with sub-menu choices. The date selection settings are listed below.

Properties - Opens a Date Selection window, where you can set a starting and ending time, as well as an interval, max number of images, and a skip factor.
Set Visible Range - Stretches out the timeline seen in the Absolute tab to cover the selected time range.
Set Date Selection - Selects all of the times in the time range selected.
Use Visible Range - Selects all of the times currently visible in the Absolute tab.
Start/End date - Defines the range to look within.
Interval - Allows you to select dates every N time units.
Skip Factor - Skips every N'th time that would be selected.
Count - Specifies a max number of times that will be selected. Only the most recent N times will be selected.
Sunrise/Sunset - Shades the background of the times in yellow when the sun is up, and in white when the sun is down.
Before/After Range - Displays as the little gray triangles in the timeline. By default, the ranges that we use are one half the size of the interval. However, you can set the range both before and after the interval tick. So for example, if you want to just consider times within 15 minutes before the interval but nothing after the interval set the Before Range to be 15 minutes and the After Range to be 0 minutes.

The View Managers use the timeline to show the animation time set and the times of the different displays. Here, the timeline is used for informational purposes and is not used to select times. This can be shown through the View->Animation Timeline menu. The gray timeline represents non-visible displays. Double clicking in a timeline sets the animation step to that time.

Image 2: Animation Timeline Window

Timeline Navigation

The timeline supports a variety of navigation mechanisms:

Event	Action
Left Mouse Drag	Change visible range or date selection range.
Left/Right Arrow	Change visible range. Use Ctrl+Key to change date selection. Use Shift+Key to use larger increment.
Up/Down Arrow	Zoom in/out visible range. Use Ctrl+Key to change date selection. Use Shift+Key to use larger increment.
Mouse Click; Control-Click; Shift-Click	Select individual times, multiple times or a range of times
Shift-Drag	When not showing the date selection mechanism you can choose a range of times with shift-drag
Right Mouse Click	This brings up a popup menu that allows you to show the properties dialog, go to particular current date ranges, set the interval, range, skip factor and count of the date selection.

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