Introduction

The Ether of a band dictates how time is mapped onto the pixel space: how many pixels a time span takes up. The ether painter makes this mapping visible to the user by painting various markings on the background of the band, e.g., "Jun", "Jul", "2005", "2006". The event painter, paints the events that are fed to it by the ether source. The Timeline.DurationEventPainter uses a layout to determine how to distribute the events among several tracks] such that events don't overlap one another.

An '''ether''' is an object used by a band to map between pixel coordinates and date/time.

Each band keeps a single ether. The ether keeps track of the date corresponding to the left (or top) edge of the visible area of the band. That date corresponds to pixel offset 0 (see below). The ether's sole responsibility is to return a date when given a positive or negative pixel offset, and to return a pixel offset when given a date.

An ether's mapping, abstract, is made visible to the user by an ether painter.

Interface

An ether must expose the following Javascript interface:

constructor ( params )

params is an object whose fields carry initialization settings for the ether. Different ether classes require different fields in this initialization object. Refer to the documentation of each ether class for details see Ether Implemenations below).

initialize ( timeline )

timeline is the timeline to which this ether belongs. This method is called by the timeline itself as it is being initialized. Client code is not supposed to call this method.

dateToPixelOffset ( date )

Map the given date argument (a Javascript Date) to a pixel offset (positive or negative, float). Note that you must round the result (e.g., using Math.round()) before you can use it as a coordinate of some element, e.g.,

elmt.style.left = Math.round(ether.dateToPixelOffset(aDate)) + "px";

pixelOffsetToDate ( pixels )

Map the given pixel offset (positive or negative, float) to a Date.

setDate ( date )

Set the date that corresponds to pixel offset 0 to the date argument.

shiftPixels ( pixels )

Shift the origin of the ether by the given number of pixels (positive or negative, float). A positive pixels makes the ether start later, a negative pixels makes it start earlier. This method is equivalent to:

ether.setDate(ether.pixelOffsetToDate(pixels))