Timeline

The Timeline web part displays a roll up of news articles, content pages or events based on search results in a vertical or horizontal timeline view.

Selecting Events, only events that start after today are shown.

All items are displayed from most recent first.

Configuration

The Timeline web part is search driven and configuration is based around searching for content from the selected source.

Configuration Options

Option	Description	Required
Mode	Select which view to display the timeline in.	Yes
Item Margin	Slider to set the margin between items in horizontal mode.	No.
Search Criteria	Search for content using keywords or a query.	No
Search Option	Select what content to search for, Both Content & News Pages, only News Articles, only Content Pages, or only Events.	Yes
Source	Select where to search for content or choose to use a results source.	Yes
Result Source Id	When source is set to use a result source provide a result source ID to use.	No
Managed Properties	Dropdown list of managed properties when selected will show tags on the timeline items.	No
Sort Property	Select which managed property the timeline is sorted by (see below). For best results when showing Events, set this property to EventsRollUpStartDate
Item Limit	Sets the number of item to show per page.	No
Friendly Date	Toggle to display news dates as friendly (todays date will display as 'Today').	No

Sorting

By default, the timeline is sorted in descending order by the Last Modified Time of each item. This can be customised by specifying a different Managed Property.

In most scenarios, use one of the unmapped RefinableDate properties supplied by SharePoint, map it to the property that is to be used for sorting.

• Go to the SharePoint Search Administration page in the Admin Centre (under More Options)
• click Manage Search Schema
• Search for RefinableDate
• Find an unused (that is, not mapped) refinable date slot
• Click into it, and scroll down to the bottom
• Click Add a Mapping
• A popup box will appear. Search for the desired crawled property to be mapped. This is usually in the format of ows_<INTERNAL NAME>, e.g. ows_MercuryArticleDate.
• Select the desired crawled property, Click OK to close the dialog
• Repeat the steps to add the crawled property ows_q_DATE_Modified to the mapping list - you must add this property as the last property in the mapping list, to act as a fallback for when the desired crawled property is empty
• Click OK to close the Managed Property configuration page

Note

You may have to re-crawl the library containing content you wish to index before you are able to select the RefinableDate property in the web part.

This may take over an hour to complete.

Horizontal View

Vertical View

Config Repository

This web part supports use of the config repository, to allow users to save and load configurations of web parts with ease.

Loading a config file will populate the web part properties with properties from the incoming file.

SharePoint

Saving to SharePoint allows collaboration between users in a tenant.

The path the file is saved to is tenant-name/Site Assets/Mercury Assets/webpart-name.json.

Permissions

To save a file to SharePoint, edit permissions are required on the root Site Assets library.

To load a file from SharePoint, read permissions are required on the root Site Assets library.

OneDrive

Saving to OneDrive allows a user to save a file locally, this is the best option when a user does not have the required permissions to save to SharePoint.

The path the file is saved to is Mercury Assets/webpartname.json.