Reposition Events with Drag and Drop

Preceden supports full drag and drop on your timeline.

There are two aspects of it: dragging and dropping an event to change its order and dragging and dropping an event to change its dates.

Change the Order of Events with Drag and Drop

When you add an event to your timeline, Preceden determines its placement by using the start date, with ties broken alphabetically by the event name. For example, here's a timeline with three events:

Preceden uses a waterfall layout by default, meaning it will only put one event on each horizontal row.

However, you can reorder events by dragging them from one location to another.

To do this, click an event in your timeline and, without releasing your mouse, drag it up or down to a new position:

If you want Preceden to automatically compress layers to place as many events on a row as possible, check the Automatically compress layers setting under Appearance > Layers. With this setting checked, Preceden will automatically flatten each layer, eliminating the need to drag and drop events:

Change an Event's Dates with Drag and Drop

Preceden also lets you change an event's dates with drag and drop in most cases:

There are two ways to do it:

• Move the whole event: hold Shift while you drag the event left or right. Its dates move together, so a bar keeps its length. Shift is required so that dragging an event up or down to reorder it can't change its dates by accident.
• Change just the start or end date: hover over the event's bar and a handle appears at each end. Drag the left handle to change the start date, or the right handle to change the end date. You don't need to hold Shift for this.

If your timeline shows event dates, they update as you drag, so you can see where the event will land before you let go.

Things to Know

• New events are automatically positioned based on the event's start date.
• It's not currently possible to drag an event from one layer to another. You'll have to edit the event and change the layer to place it in a new layer.
• If you update the event's start date or move it from one layer to another, the event is repositioned automatically. In both of these situations, you can reorder the event afterwards to change the order.
• Dragged dates snap to whole days when you're zoomed in close enough. Further out, they snap to steps of a week, a month, a year, or longer, so zoom in when you need to move an event by a single day.
• The handles don't appear on bars that are too narrow to grab. Zoom in to change the start or end date of a very short event.
• If the event starts when another event ends (using Preceden's dependency feature) then Preceden won't let you change its dates with drag and drop.
• Preceden does let you reposition an event that starts or ends "Today" (because that falls at the start or end of a full day), but won't let you drag an event that starts or ends "Now" (because that includes the time which makes the event not start/end on a full day).
• Preceden won't let you drag an event left or right if part of it falls off the screen (for example, if you're zoomed in). You'll need to zoom back out to drag these events left and right.
• Preceden also does not support changing dates of BC events using drag and drop.
• If the event does not start on a whole day, or (assuming it has an end date) if its duration is not a full number of days, Preceden won't let you drag and drop it to change its date. That covers an event starting at 2pm, for example, or one lasting 6 hours. This prevents people from accidentally dragging an event that starts at 2pm so that it starts at midnight of some nearby day instead.
• If the end date is dynamic, for example "8 days", then Preceden will set the new duration to the new number of days (vs setting it to a specific date).

If you have any feedback or suggestions, don't hesitate to reach out: [email protected].