Javascript tools for building something that looks like a cable program guide

Question

I am looking for some tools or examples of code to help me build something that looks and behaves somewhat like a cable program guide. The general idea is that this will be an administration UI to schedule assets on individual channels. Scheduled assets cannot overlap on any given channel.

I found at least one decent looking scheduler (dhtmlxScheduler) but I fear that it will not be flexible enough for me to tweak to my liking. So I think I might need a more generic solution that I can bend in the direction I need it to move.

I would hate to resort to Flex for this but it might be my best bet. Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

I can not think of a javascript library that has a similar option and I have worked with several (dojo, ext, yui). With that being said though when I think of a cable menu it seems to just be a table so I would think you could dynamically create the elements and set their column span and styles with almost any javascript library. I have not done anything with Flex so I can not compare the ease with which to do that but it seems fairly routine with javascript.

Edit: my td tag got deleted. Sorry I don't know how to use stack overflow yet.

Answer 2

Here's a very powerful scheduler http://www.ext-scheduler.com/

Many examples on this page, http://www.ext-scheduler.com/examples.html

It's not free and it requires ext-js. However, it's well designed, customizable and pretty.

Answer 3

dhtmlxScheduler has unit view and timeline modes - in both you can define some "events" for different persons|channels|etc.

http://docs.dhtmlx.com/doku.php?id=dhtmlxscheduler:timeline http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxScheduler/sample_units.html

Also, it contains built in support for "non-overlap" functionality. So it seems to be a natural solution for your task.

Answer 4

BBC Glow (open source, free, JS library) has a TV schedule widget that is actually used for the BBC's online multichannel TV guide (which I now can't find, grrr).

It's called timetable and the docs for it are here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/docs/1.7/api/glow.widgets.timetable.shtml

It's not obvious, but there's a working example demo here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/demos/timetable/