Relationships specific to the duration of an event

[ManWithNoExpression (Ryan Martin)]

I’m new to this and it seems like this might be a feature request, but if someone knows how to do it and could tell me that’d be fantastic.

Basically I’m trying to make a timeline of which guitars were used by each of the Beatles on each song.
So I can map a timeline of every recording session and have each song as a child event, but I’d like to select a Person (member of the Beatles) and associate the Person to a particular guitar only for the duration of that event. So far the best workaround I have is to make the person himself a child event of that and tag the Person type and the Guitar type to that event.

[Keith]

See my response to the thread below which I think is in a similar vein

Questions on Relationships

I’m not sure how Relationships work but lets say you create a Data Type called Math Class. You then relate who you want in that class. But as time goes on people will come and go. So is it possible to give people start and stop times for their relationship? Maybe as a future request? Or should I not be using relationships in that way? One example I can think of, if you look up almost any band on Wikipedia you will see colored lines showing when a certain member played in the band under the…

You’ll need to play around to see what works best for how you want to display and search this. I’m not clear if you want to see the data top down (session, recording, person, guitar) or bottom up (guitar, person, recording, sessions).

Without trying to build this it’s difficult to advise which elements should be data types and which should be properties. I’d recommend trialing several different approaches to see which works best for your needs. It’s only through trial and error that you find what works and what doesn’t.

[Peter_T]

This is an interesting problem. If we wanted to plot in a diagram which singer is using which guitar at which time, we would end up with three dimensions.

To translate this into the two-dimensional timeline event-relationship system, we could consider a separate timeline for each singer, where the performance events are related to the guitars used.

By multiplying the performance events (one per participating singer), you are, in a sense, layering several timelines across one another. That seems like a pretty good approach.

It would also work the other way around, i.e. a timeline for each guitar, whereby the respective singers would then be related to the events. With your method, you would then create one performance event per guitar that is related to the singer using it.

Which is better depends on how you want to evaluate the results. However, since the number of singers is probably smaller than the number of guitars, the first approach seems to me to be easier to do. I think you’re on the right track.

[ManWithNoExpression (Ryan Martin)]

Yeah, this classroom idea sounds about the same as what I’m trying to do.

I think that the way I’m currently trying to do it with each person as a child event which is tagged with that person type and guitar type seems to be working pretty well, it’s just a little uglier than ideal and takes up extra vertical space. It makes it very easy for me to select one person and see every guitar they played at each session or select any guitar and see every session it was at and who played it, which is what I wanted.

I should still play around with the properties tab, since I haven’t messed with that very much yet, and see if there’s any better way to do it.