Time Warp vs Timeline

There are two great component on AppExchange. Timeline has been around for a while, Time Warp is pretty new. Both of the has been published under the Salesforce Labs account, meaning they have been developed by Salesforce people, went through standard security process and provided for free to customers.

What they do? They visualise how all the records follow after each other. You know, by default we are used to those related lists, when we speak about contact you can see all those campaign they have been part of, at different related list all the opportunities, completely separated are activities, meaning emails, tasks, phone calls. And when you want to see what followed what you are pretty lost and that’s exactly what these two (and probably plenty others) components solve for you, each of them in a bit different way.

Timeline

This component is a bit older, you can find documentation and even future roadmap and it can basically replace the standard Activities component we are used to see on the right handside.

Timeline

You can filter by object and you can specify the time frame when viewing on record.

What I really like is the configuration. It is like a wizard, where you select the parent object and then can add multiple (probably unlimited) number of related record, for each of them you need to select the title and date field and can add additional fields, which are visible when you „expand“ the record. Plus you can add a filter if you want to see just subset of those documents. You can also create a multiple different configurations for the same parent object, but you cannot put the same child object into one configuration twice (even though there is no check during configuration but it will fail during runtime).

Time Warp

Time Warp has documentation as well, the main difference in configuration is, that it uses Custom Metadata Types, meaning it will transfer between sandboxes, but you need to specify it manually and there is no configuration wizard. The great part is, that it is preconfigured for the standard objects, so all you need to do is put it on the Lightning Page and you might be good to go.

It visualise the data differently – as the „real“ timeline where you can scroll left and right.

Time Warp

Again, you can filter on the component to see only some objects, you can make it smaller or higher, you can see „into the future“ as well. Sadly you cannot (as a user) zoom out to see more at the same time, but as an admin you can specify both the time range into history and future as well as the zoom range. Another drawback is, that you cannot filter records it shows, when you want to see just subset of records.

Which one?

I would say both of them might be beneficial for your implementation, go and check them. It looks they are both production ready, I tested on an instance with a few million records and there was do speed consequences on opening the record details.

Leave a Reply