Technical Bulletin – February 2018

Now that ‘Project C21’ is underway, a change in the way the Past Diary is presented has become necessary. Whilst the Future Diary page varies up or down in length only slightly over time, as new events are added at much the same rate as older one take place and are removed, the Past Diary only ever grows longer. Eventually, the page length will have a severe effect on both page loading time and how long it takes to scroll around the page. To address this problem, the Past Diary has now been subdivided into four separate pages, each covering a five-year period (or part thereof). From the main menu, you can go straight to any one of the four pages. On each page, there are buttons at the top to take you to any other period, or to the Future Diary. At the bottom of each page is a button to take you straight to the top of the next chronological page. We have also implemented filtering of events in the Past Diary as in the Future Diary (the choices being all events, choral/opera or orchestra/concert band). Once you have selected a filter, using the buttons to move between pages retains the filter setting; however, choosing a page from the main menu always resets the filter to ‘all events’.

The way the Past Group List is presented has also changed, as now by default the list of events for each group is hidden, leaving visible just an alphabetic list of group names. This allows users to scroll through the list much more quickly: a single click next to any group name will open their list of events. As Project C21 progresses, we will monitor page-loading time for this page and for the index of works pages carefully. If they slow excessively, we may have to split them into subpages covering, for example, A-D, E-K and so on. As with the diary, the Future Group List and Future Index of Works will remain single pages.