Documenting technical changes to your timeline

Q & A
#1

I am continuing to work on what I envisage to be a significant timeline with lots of event types, data items, parameters etc and am somewhat concerned that as I introduce new aspects I will break something. So, I am wondering how best to keep a record of the changes I am making i.e. Release notes .

Is there a recognised best way of doing this or is it something I need to document outside of AEON Timeline. If that is the case this might be something worth adding to the ever growing feature requests list.

#2

The professional approach here would be to use a version control system.
You could use a private repository at GitHub or GitLab for your timeline and a desktop client to document and save the changes. The advantage over a plain change list (whether in an Aeon Timeline element or in a separate file) is that you can revert to previous versions. You can also create branches to try things out. Of course, this is also a first-class data backup.

For text files, the desktop client shows the differences to the previous version, so if you store a csv export file along with your timeline, you can see the changes in every version:

Screenshot 2024-03-29 222329
Screenshot 2024-03-29 2223291346×767 83.6 KB

Edit:
Updated the screenshot with an Aeon 2 example made on the fly.

#3

Thanks for the response, I am familiar with Github in relation to programming, but had not considered it for this project. It’s not so much a case of me managing changes to the data, i.e. making a back up, it’s more a case of tracking changes to item types, relationships, parameters, etc that I might make.

As far as I am aware, such changes are not recorded in any of the export methods, e.g. csv files.

I wondered if anyone was managing the tracking in Aeon itself. I can think of a couple of potential ways of doing it but wondered how others might do this, if at all.

#4

Are you looking for a way to store project annotations in a similar way to Office documents where there usually is a “Document Properties” dialog?

I still use Aeon Timeline 2, there are the “Notifications” (Ctrl-Alt-T) under the menu item “Timeline”. I would enter my change notes here if necessary. I don’t know where to find the equivalent in Aeon 3, if there is one.

That’s right. If I wanted to track project metadata via version control, I would extract the corresponding text from the .aeon file. Some time ago, I published a script that exports the JSON part from the Aeon 2 and Aeon 3 files.

The Aeon 3 sample project looks like this:

Screenshot 2024-03-31 005251
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This means that changes to the project structure can already be visualised. If I wanted to make it even more convenient, I would extend the script so that it resolves the references and discards the data I don’t need. I would then hook that script into the Git commit.
But that’s just a side note.