Not Really Happy with Today’s Work
Today I have been adding in the ability to see more than just a day in my web app using the Google Visualization Annotated Time Line (ATL). The problem is, the ATL is a good time visualization tool, and it's not really producing "good" looking plots for the weekly, monthly, and yearly data. Oh, it works, but the x-axis remains true to the date/time which means that when I show a week, two of the seven days are flat, and very uninteresting. But there's no way to "compress" the "blank" space in time.
The other problems are that some of the data is 'reset' every day - like the P/L. That means that every day it's going to start back at 0, and work it's way up (or down) that day. But in the end, it's going to go back to 0 at the start of the next day. While this is exactly what they want from a business and accounting point of view, it's not leading to very interesting looking graphs as they seem to just "jump up" a little and then hop back down to 0.
For a lot of the datasets, the trading day is about eight hours, which means that the majority of the graph really doesn't have anything "interesting" on it. This is exactly what you'd expect, but it leads to a view that's really not very nice to look at.
So in the end, while it works, and does exactly what I asked it to do, it's not really what I want, nor is it reasonably speedy. It's going through a ton of data, so when looking at the year, it's a good 30 sec to get new data. Not really "zippy", that's for sure.
I'm glad that I got the code to work - it's quite a bit of non-trivial code, but I can't really say that I like the way it looks. It's doing the right thing, but it's not what I think the users are going to want to see when they think "week", "month", and "year".
I've kicked it out to the group and we'll see what everyone has to say. I'm betting that the guy who asked for this is going to have a mixed reaction to it, and write a 42-page opus on what to do next to make it better.
Goody.