Aggregate by quarter instead of by month

[georgiamoon]

I forget if we can do this already, but if not we should when we know we don't have as much data in certain locations -- change the time aggregations to quarters or years, etc, or remove the timeline and just show all the data we know about.

If this is possible, then let's document it?

[georgiamoon]

@dwins sent me this: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/functions-datetime.html#FUNCTIONS-DATETIME-TRUNC

which means we could change the default to quarters! something to look at as part of the #mozsprint

[critzo]

This can be accomplished by changing the UI display from months to quarters and setting the query string to bin by quarter.

[critzo]

@georgiamoon @meagdoh I'm putting some notes here on what I've been working on for this issue.

• I'm working on this in a feature branch: https://github.com/critzo/piecewise/tree/quarters
• A GCE VM is available to test deploy to here: https://104.197.237.109/
  • Georgia you should have ssh access to this VM now
  • Meag, if you send me your SSH public key, I'll add your access to it

Summary of Work:

• Postgres supports quarter aggregation out of the box, so changing the dataURL is pretty easy.
• Debugging and getting the JavaScript / JQuery to update the URL with appropriate start and end timestamps when the user clicks on the timeline element has been the main sticky bit.
• Two things to-do:
  • Adjust the timeline/slider so it displays four quarters instead of 12 months
  • Month / Quarter labels are defined in the global config file
  • Slider instantiation is happening in piecewise_web/mlab.js
    • L168
    • L198
  • Adjust the functions that provide start/end when selecting a particular quarter
  • I started a function, getQuarter, to provide the start/end timestamps of a quarter, given a selected month, but it's not working.
  • I think that getQuarter needs to be called on the index page, so that when users click on a selected tick mark the quarter values are updated.