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Monday, September 9, 2019

A new skin for TilesFX

Aloha,

Finally found some time to add some more features to TilesFX. This time I've added a new skin to visualize timeline data. Because our son has diabetes I would like to monitor his blood glucose values more closely using my TilesFX based dashboard at home.
So I figured out that there was no really useful skin available for TilesFX that I can use. But now there is...the TimelineTileSkin.
Here is a little screenshot of the new skin:


In principle the skin looks very similar to the SparklineTileSkin but here I simply can use time based to data. There is a ChartData class in TilesFX that has a timestamp property and so instead of using the value property of the Tile class one now simply add ChartData to the Tile.
To be able to visualize time based data I've added properties for a time period and for a max time period.
On the screenshot above the timePeriod is 3 hours which means the width of the tile represents 3 hours counting from now to 3 hours back in time. Every chartData object that you add which has a timestamp that is within the last 3 hours will be drawn. The tile will keep a max no of data defined by the maxTimePeriod property. Data that is older than 3 hours will move out of the graph on the left side and new data will be added on the right side. It is also possible to define a resolution in TimeUnits.
So if you would like to visualize the last 3 hours with a resolution of minutes you can define it by setting the timePeriodResolution with TimeUnit.MINUTES.
The smallest possible resolution is seconds, even if you set it to milliseconds or smaller it will be set back to seconds.
It is possible to use seconds, minutes, days and months. 
In addition to this I've also added a lowerThreshold with a lowerThresholdColor. The threshold and the lowerThreshold will be visualized with a dashed line that will be stroked with their given colors.
One could also define Sections with colors (the two red and one green areas on the screenshot above).
On the left side of the graph you see the minimum and maximum measured value (taken from the visible values!) In this case the highest measured value within the last 3 hours has been 349.
Like with the other charts one can define a number of stops that will be used to stroke the line when strokeWithGradient == true. Otherwise it will use the barColor to stroke the line. If you enable smoothing the line between the points will be smoothed, otherwise it will simply connect the data points.
On the right side of the chart you see the minimum and maximum value of the chart (0 and 350).
The small percentage values on the left side will show how many data points that are within the timePeriod are in each section. In the screenshot above this would mean for example that 18% of all visible data points are in the green section.

I've created the TimelineTimeSkin because I have a need for it to visualize the blood glucose values of our son, meaning to say it might not fit for your needs. So please let me know if you find some bugs or if you need something else and maybe I can help you with that.

The new skin is part of the latest version 11.6 which can be found here:


I hope this additional skin might help one or the other, so that's it for today...keep coding...

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