Bar duration in roadmap-planner storage format

Question

Dear all,

I'd like to automatically update roadmap-planner macros via the REST API. However, it seems that the choice of representation is a bit roundabout:

{
  // ...
  lanes: [
    {
      title: 'Some Lane',
      color: { bar: 'red', count: 1, lane: 'blue', text: 'black' },
      bars: [
        {
          title: 'Some Bar',
          description: '',
          startDate: '2017-01-01T00:00:00.000Z',
          duration: 3.456, // <========= PROBLEM
          rowIndex: 0,
          id: '57ab0b36-7ba5-4f89-957b-d83bd5ff7e3f'
        },
        // ...
      ]
    },
    // ...
  ],
  // ...
}

The problem for me with this format is that the duration needs to be specified either as a fraction of weeks or months, depending on the roadmap display option.

However, if selecting months, given a start and end date, it seems to be quite non-trivial to compute the months fraction, since not all months are equal length. If I understand the plugin source code it looks like this calculation is based on the milliseconds in a month.

So, here the questions:

* Anybody got experience automatically updating the roadmap? How do you handle the duration?
* Isn't this model overcomplicating things? Wouldn't it be much more natural to specify an end-date? Would such a feature-request in the issue tracker have a chance?

michael_wild · Answer

Besides my questions which I still hold up, here is a function which seems to accurately compute the months duration as expected by Confluence with the help of moment.js:

function countMonths(start, end)
{
  var s = moment(start);
  var e = moment(end);

var sbom = moment(start).startOf('month');
  var seom = moment(start).endOf('month');

var ebom = moment(end).startOf('month');
  var eeom = moment(end).endOf('month');

var count = Math.round(ebom.diff(seom, 'months', true)) + 1;
  count += seom.diff(s) / seom.diff(sbom);
  count += e.diff(eeom) / eeom.diff(ebom);
  return count;
}