Timeline is frustrating, unintuitive and at times unusable.

[Julie_7]

I think the timeline implementation is a bad design. I have read every post on the forum relating to the timeline and most of them are about issues that I also have.

I do have some good words to say. The timeline is a great feature. Being able to play a design and see is change is awesome. It has colors to show which component each step is in and the tool tip also tells you the module and feature.

Given that the time line for a reasonably sized design can get very long and be impossible to scroll through, being able to combine and name parts of it is a required feature so that is good.

Things that are not obvious and cause problems.

When a component is active the timeline shows steps for that feature. However, it doesn't make those steps adjacent in the timeline. It took some time before I realized that I needed to roll back the timeline so that I could put steps for a component all in one place.

You can move items in the timeline only if it is at the very end and you have the top level design component selected. And even then it might not let you and it won't be obvious why.

Dependencies are not visible, and then can cause major problems.

Keeping the timeline sensible is almost impossible. Restructuring a design to have better components and items in the right place and a timeline that makes sense is impossible. If you have a poorly structured design, perhaps that you inherit from someone else, you can't reorganize it. You will end up breaking it if you try. Most of the things you try to do, such as moving bodies to other components, deleting and such end up at the end of the timeline. You will always end up with a timeline that you can't play because it won't have the correct meaning.

I do have suggestions, and I believe that they are all possible without breaking existing designs.

1. Make a component a cohesive unit

A component in the browser is a scope and that scope is real and visible. Give that component a scope in the timeline by changing the timeline so that group == component. Groups no longer need to be created manually or named manually.

In addition, if a component is active, show only its group in the timeline (this is being done now), but also add any new steps to the component timeline group instead of at the end of the timeline. This removes the need to rollback the timeline before activating a component to make changes when you want all the component steps sequential in the timeline.

2. make dependencies visible in some way.

Frequently a designer wants to move a body to a different component, reorder components in the browser, move something in the timeline. All of these are currently problematic because there can be dependencies that prevent the change, but there is no way to see them.  (Parameters have dependencies and won't let you delete them if used by another, but you can at least filter and find the uses.)

I recently got in a state where Fusion 360 keep telling me I had a circular dependency. I was positive that one of the items did not depend on the other, but it would not let me continue. I finally had to start deleting things until it was happy again.

Instead of creating groups in the timeline manually, creating a component creates a group.

When a component is active and its timeline is shown, changes to the component are added to the components group and not at the end of the timeline.

Summary

A design is a hierarchical structure composed of components and items that are part of components. Please make the timeline also reflect that same structure. This implies that the steps in the timeline are another type of part of the component structure just like bodies or sketches.