Ability to export chats using a time range (instead of number of messages)

[nekohayo]

Your use case

The basic chat log exporting feature implemented in #2630 works, but I find it very limiting when you can only specify these types of ranges:

• "Current timeline":
  It is unclear what this actually does. Like, what constitutes the beginning and end of "current"?
• "From the beginning":
  Very rarely do you actually want to do this.
• "Specify a number of messages":
  I never know exactly what amount of messages I want to export, because I'm not going to start counting them myself... so in practice I always end up vastly underestimating or vastly overestimating.

I would like to be able to export using a range of dates (and/or hours, depending on the situation).
Ex: from YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM to YYYY-MM-DD, or "last 6 hours", etc.

Have you considered any alternatives?

No response

Additional context

No response

[t3chguy]

Related #19310

[nekohayo]

Indeed, I was not able to find that other ticket because it was titled too generically; that said, it also talks about other features / a wider scope. This ticket here is a subset of it that could potentially be implemented independently as a first step.

[fran-f]

Getting close to the end of the year, this issue comes back to my mind. Having a way to download the past 12 month of messages would make incremental backups possible.

There is already a bit of code commented out here:

element-web/src/utils/exportUtils/Exporter.ts

Lines 167 to 171 in 18ef975

	// if (this.exportOptions.startDate && mxEv.getTs() < this.exportOptions.startDate) {
	// // Once the last message received is older than the start date, we break out of both the loops
	// limit = 0;
	// break;
	// }

Would be great to have a start date selector in the export dialog, without the complex interface discussed in #19310.

[t3chguy]

Contributions welcome

[fran-f]

I'll start by contributing a mock-up!

[fran-f]

Alternatively, with a date range. The assumed time would be 00:00:00 for the start date, and 23:59:59 for the end date.

Although looking at the export loop, which is implemented as "get a page, then go back a page", start date only might be an easier first step.

[t3chguy]

Keep in mind timestamps may appear in pages out of order, as servers over federation may not have synchronised clocks, heterogenous distributed systems and all that

[fran-f]

Thanks for pointing that out. Then a single event is not enough to signal the boundary of a range, but we should probably check "a few minutes further" for safety?