@artoonie/timeline-range-slider

A lightweight range slider with expandable timeline

See this project at artoonie.github.io/timeline-range-slider

The project page has dynamic sliders you can interact with.

A lightweight, dependency-free range slider

The default configuration gives you a slider with a collapsible timeline:

[interactive demo]

Features & Benefits

Features:

• A mobile-friendly range slider,
• With a collapsible events timeline to list events which occurred at each index in the slider,
• With tooltips for deeper explanations of the summaries

Benefits:

• Vanilla Javascript & CSS
• No external libraries: no jQuery, bootstrap, Sass, etc
• Simple javascript configuration with sane defaults
• Simple, easy-to-override CSS
• Permissive license

Examples

#1: Default

[interactive demo]

#2: Dark theme

[interactive demo]

#3: Small and continuous

[interactive demo]

#4: Variable tick text

[interactive demo]

Usage

Installation

Pick what works for your setup:

1. npm i @artoonie/timeline-range-slider
2. Download assets from github package
3. Just download the files in the timeline-range-slider directory. Go on. I won't judge you.

Usage

API: Vanilla Javascript

If you're not using node.js, functions begin with trs_ namespace to avoid conflicts:

Include the files in your HTML and create a wrapper div:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="slider.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="slider.js"></script>
<div id="slide"></div>

Create a slider by calling:

const config = {wrapperDivId: 'slide', numTicks: 10}
trs_createSliderAndTimeline(config);

additional config options are described below.

You can a slider value manually by calling:

trs_setSliderValue('slide', 5);

You can animate a slider to have it move front-to-back with

trs_animate('slide');

Hide the timeline with:

trs_toggleTimelineVisibility('slide');

API: Using node.js

HTML:

const slider = require('./timeline-range-slider/slider.js');
require('./timeline-range-slider/slider.css');

<div id="slide"></div>

Javascript:

slider.createSliderAndTimeline(config);
slider.setSliderValue('slide', 5);
slider.animate('slide');
slider.toggleTimelineVisibility('slide');

Configuration options

The config dictionary has the following options:

key/default	description
wrapperDivId* required	The div id in which to place the slider
numTicks* required	The number of elements in the slider
width default: 600	The maximum width of the slider. If the page is narrower than this, the slider will responsively scale.
hideTimelineInitially default: true	Whether or not the timeline is initially expanded or collapsed
tickLabelPrefix default: 'Round '	What does each tick represent? Placed in the header row of the timeline.
hideActiveTickText default: false	Should we hide tickText on the active tick? By default, we hide the text and show a slider via CSS. Only change this if you override the CSS for the active tick.
tickText default: '•'	The text that marks a tick in the slider. Can be a single string or a list. If it's a list, must be the size of numTicks.
color default: 'orangered'	The color of past tick marks. Can be a single string or a list. If it's a list, must be of size numTicks.
sliderValueChanged default: null	Callback to be notified when the slider changes.
animateOnLoad default: false	Should the slider animate all steps on load?
timeBetweenStepsMs default: 1s/numTicks	How fast should the animation run?
timelinePeeking default: true	Should the timeline "peek open" during animation, and close after the animation completes?
timelineData default: random data	The timeline data. See below for how to structure this.
leftArrowText default: <	What text to place in the left arrow button?
rightArrowText default: <	What text to place in the right arrow button?

Timeline data structure

The timelineData contains the events that occurred at each "tick" in the timeline. It is a list of lists. Each of the numTicks elements contains a list of events. A single event is structured as follows:

const oneTimelineItem = {
  summaryText: "Short summary",

  /* optional */
  className: "custom-class-for-summary-label",

  /* optional */
  moreInfoText: "Description to show when hovering" 
}

Each "tick" can have multiple events (or zero events).

A complete timelineData structure might look like:

const timelineData = [
    [
        {summaryText: "Event 1, tick 1"},
        {summaryText: "Event 2, tick 1"}
    ],
    [
        {summaryText: "Event 1, tick 2",
         className: "some-class"}
    ],
    [ /* No events in tick 3 */
    ],
    [
        {summaryText: "Event 1, tick 4"},
        {summaryText: "Event 2, tick 4"},
        {summaryText: "Event 3, tick 4",
         moreInfoText: "a long description"}
    ]
]