In case you’re wondering, I haven’t forsaken BambooInvoice, just had lots of other neat stuff “on my plate”.  Anyhow, my taxes are due for the quarter, and I needed to figure out how GST I’ve collected, so that I know how much blood the government wants to squeeze from me.  Seems as good a time as any to add that functionality into Bamboo.  So under the reports section I’ve added a new quarterly report tool.

The 4 quarters are hard-coded dates (that might be configurable in a future version), but notice the “Custom Date Reports” option?  Yeah, I think that’s ugly and unelegant also.  So I’ve been trying to think of a way to allow the end user to gracefully select their date range besides a clunky text input.  Pop up calendars seem like an obvious candidate, but they seem so obtrusive for what I want. 

The measure map slider seemed absolutely perfect, but after I implemented it I realized how limited it is in an application like Bamboo. Firstly, how do I set the bar?  Only for this year?  What if I want to run a query starting from 3 years ago?  Secondly, it’s hard-coded at 120 data points.  Who knew?  And currently it is powered by an XML file.  It wouldn’t be too hard to convert that to a database call, (heck, they even provide the .fla source files), but now I’m trying to change the tool fundamentally, and it isn’t even really appropriate to start with. Too bad, since the guys at Adaptive Path did some great work on that one.

So then I set about to find a Scriptaculous equivalent… but I’ve not yet turned up anything notable.  There are about a billion examples of using javascript sliders, but nothing that I found that worked nicely for dates.  I’m debating building my own, but that seems like an awful lot of work, and you know, good programmers are lazy and dumb.

So my question is - what is the most elegant way to build that interface?  If you have any suggestions or pointers or links, please leave them in the comments!