Gantt charts

[stonebranch2]

Hi Isomorphic,

We are looking at adding some Gannt charts to our product, and the current timeline available from SmartGWT is not rich enough to meet our requirements.

Do you have any recommendation for a third party integration that you know would be compatible.

Regards

[Isomorphic]

We don't have a third-party component to recommend here, since past customers looking for Gantt functionality have either found that the Timeline met their needs if custom code was added, or that they could build what they needed just starting from ListGrid.

If you can tell us the specific things you need to do that you haven't figured out how to do with a Timeline, we can perhaps point out the right approaches, either as custom code or as small sponsorships.

[slick07]

Do you have any recommendation for a third party integration that you know would be compatible.

I do not think you can find a third-party component. At least we did not find when we created ours... Here are some possible options:
- go with the Timeline component and try to improve it as Isomorphic suggests. This solution is the fastest if you succeed to add your requirements directly or through sponsorships.
- go with a TreeGrid and a side by side Canvas where you manage your own drawings through SVG. But that is a lot of work.

[Isomorphic]

slick07 thanks for chiming in. To understand your second approach, did you do a manual SVG rendering of the critical part of the Gantt, basically using the TreeGrid on the left hand side for folders, and doing the rest via direct use of SVG?

If so that's an impressive effort, especially given all the SVG weirdness in different browsers! We hope you didn't have to support IE11, which soon, none of us will have to support.

Anyway, when we have done customer-specific Gantts, when we needed draw things like connector lines or other typical Gantt visual elements, we basically did one of two things:

1) added them as images, as recordComponents or just as direct children of the grid, manually managed and placed. This works when the required visual presentation is fairly simple, and the recordComponents system can be used to get automatic pooling if you are trying to support a Gantt with tens of thousands or millions of line items, so it scales easily.

.. or ..

2) a DrawPane as a background / intermediate layer to a ListGrid or TreeGrid. This can allow arbitrary vector shapes to basically be interleaved with standard ListGrid/TreeGrid rendering, so you can do whatever you want. This is more advanced but more capable; you have to do a little more work to make it scale to millions of elements, but the result can be very pretty.

[slick07]

slick07 thanks for chiming in. To understand your second approach, did you do a manual SVG rendering of the critical part of the Gantt, basically using the TreeGrid on the left hand side for folders, and doing the rest via direct use of SVG?

Yes, exactly. You can take a look at our product if you want to see it in action. From what I know all major browsers are supported but can not tell for sure about IE11. I would have to ask the Windows colleagues :)

When we started a few years ago Timeline component was in early stages and we were at the beginning with SmartGWT. We are not even now tech savvy with it but we handle it better :))

Regarding your other approaches, they have the advantage of less coding for events handling as the components come with them and less work to create them. However our problem was with horizontal sizes for long time intervals and configurable timescales. I would be curios if your proposed 2 options scale well also in that case and if we would choose them in case we would start it now from scratch...

[stonebranch2]

Thank you slick07 and Isomorphic for your guidance as we work through decisions on our end.