Time Warp Roadmap — Feb 2025
Goodbye Ross. Hello Epsilon.
Time Warp is an open source interactive timeline for the Salesforce platform available on the Salesforce AppExchange here.
The next release of Time Warp is planned for February 2025. We’re calling it Epsilon — a release naming system based on stars. We pick a new star every release based on their ever increasing distances from Earth.
Here are the planned features and bug fixes getting included.
New Features
API Versions
API numbers will be incremented on all metadata. The API version moves from 59.0 to 61.0.
Support for SLDS v2
Salesforce announced a refreshed visual style, dubbed Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) 2. It improves readability, colour contrast ratios and adopts curves for key visual elements. I recommend you check your custom Lightning Web Component implementations to make sure they adopt the latest styling.
Time Warp made 2 changes to support the new design system
Using slds-card
Previously Time Warp was styled using a classes not part of the design system. This is an anti-pattern for design and we’ve updated it to use the standard styling classes. This allows us to benefit from changes being made to the design system over time. Currently salesforce uses rounded corners for cards placed into a page layout. Time Warp from v1.15 now inherits the same styling when the new user interface is enabled.
We were already using base components for buttons and check boxes so these already inherit the new rounded look and feel.
Rounded iconography
By default the icons plotted on the timeline canvas uses a rounded square design. In the new design system Salesforce is moving to a circular style. Rather than automatically update this for the new design system we’ve included an additional property that can be overriden by administrators. This provides the flexibility to keep the rounded square design if preferred.
In App Builder an admin can now choose the Icon Style by setting the corresponding property.
When Circular is selected the icons in the timeline canvas update to match the new lightning design system.
Drilldown to EmailMessage and not Task
When customers are using Enhanced Email incoming Emails from contacts are stored in their own standard Object.
This feature has some considerations that can add complexity to your exisiting configuration. The biggest consideration is that the inbound email is duplicated as a task.
An email message record is automatically duplicated as a task to provide backward compatibility with activity related lists and reporting
In order to provide consistency with the standard timeline that Salesforce provides Time Warp will now navigate users to the EmailMessage record when a user clicks on an associated Task record.
Bug Fixes
Person Accounts and Activities with Multiple Contacts
When Person Accounts is being used with the option to allow multiple contacts to an activity the corresponding tasks and events were not being shown.
This was orginally due to miss configuration in the metadata. However a code change needed to be applied to make sure that PersonEventWhoRelation and PersonTaskWhoRelation standard objects were correctly interpreted as Tasks and Events.
Upgrading from a Previous Version
Epsilon will be a minor release. We plan for the upgrade path to be seamless. Time Warp upgrades are pull not push. You decide when, and if, to upgrade. When a new version is available you install the upgrade in the same way you would install any other package from the AppExchange. Just come back to the package listing in AppExchange and click ‘Get it Now’. The first page of the install wizard lists the current version you have installed, the version you’re about to install, and a list of additional components included in the new version.
We will be recommending that all users of Time Warp upgrade to the latest version in February ‘25.
Contributing
The best thing about the trailblazer community is contributions. Timeline needs lots of help and will need people to contribute who have a diversity of skills. Here’s a link to the open source repo. All contributions welcome.
