I’ve been doing some research into Meet Manager and its ability to import an SDIF entries file. Since so many teams use Meet Manager, getting data into it is pretty much of a requirement.
I posted previously on this topic but this year, as I was preparing our entries for the Cary City Meet, I did some experiments. Hy-tek now makes a demo version of Meet Manager available. The demo version is limited to six (6) events which makes it useless for doing much real work but it is fine for some simple experiments like I wanted to do.
What did I learn?
Meet Manager is really picky about SDIF. This really isn’t a surprise. The first thing I ran into was SDIF files (which are ASCII) that go through e-mail as simple attachments rarely will read into Meet Manager successfully. There is something about line endings that Meet Manager is unusually sensitive too. This issue can be avoided by zipping an SDIF file before sending it via e-mail. You can actually load the zip file into Meet Manager directly, Meet Manager will unzip it for you.
The real compatibility issue comes from D0 and E0 SDIF records which don’t have a seed time. Meet Manager simply does not like records without a seed time (blank) even though the SDIF specification indicates this is legal.
To get past this issue, the SDIF file must contain either “NT” or “00:00.0” (right justified) in the seed time field AND the course code. Meet Manager will accept both formats as “no seed time”.
Unfortunately Meet Manager still does not read heat and lane information from the SDIF record. This is really a nuisance. As near as I can tell the only way to get heat and lane information into Meet Manager is via a .CL2 file (maybe) or via a .HY3 file (definitely). Of course both of these file formats, which are similar to SDIF, contain the Hy-tek proprietary checkum for each record.
I would really like to solve this problem as it would make interchanging data so much easier.