Working on Hy-tek Entries

Over the last few days I have been working the Hy-tek HY3 equivalent of exporting SDIF meet entries.  For the most part the logic is largely the same but the Hy-tek Meet Entries format is different enough that it isn’t a simple port.  In particular, relay entries have me a bit stumped.

In SDIF it is possible to assign any number of swimmers to a relay event as an “Alternate” using the “A” designation in the leg field of the F0 record.  As near as I can tell, the Hy-tek equivalent doesn’t exist.  A relay team can be defined in the HY3 F1 record and the heat and lane assignment can be set in the F2 record.  Swimmers are designated in the F3 record.  So I am somewhat stumped – do I just define the relay teams and then let the assignment of swimmers to the relay teams happen within either Team Manager or Meet Manager or do I keep track of the number of potential swimmers and create the maximum number of relay teams and simply assign swimmers to each team so they can be sorted out later?

The other dilemma I face has to do with the swimmer id field which is not the same as the registration number field.  The swimmer id field is an internal database field which connects D1, E1, and F3 records to the same swimmer.  Within my plugin I have unique swimmer ids in the form of database record identifiers that I know will be unique.  Should I use them or is simply starting at 1 and sequencing the number of swimmers as using that as an id sufficient?

My guess is the answer to both of these questions will be “it depends” and I’ll need to experiment.  Life would be so much easier if Hy-tek would simply support the SDIF format correctly instead of the half assed way they do it now.

4 thoughts on “Working on Hy-tek Entries

  1. Is there anything available that makes the meet entry process into Hy-tek quick and simple? We are hosting a meet where most of the adult athlete information will have to be entered manually and we are not looking forward to it! Please help.

    • Hy-tek products are notoriously cumbersome to use. The user interface (aka UX) experience is weak and that is putting it nicely. I am not sure what I can do to help you, there isn’t a magic wand to make this process easy. My wp-SwimTeam plugin allows you to use WordPress to manage your swim team. While it was coded with youth swim teams in mind, there are a number of Masters teams that use it to. WordPress users can be registered as swimmers too even though it isn’t obvious when you first use the plugin.

      That said, setting up a WordPress site to manage your swim team isn’t a trivial task either. Unfortunately there is a lot of data that needs to be entered in order to run a swim meet electronically. It was my belief that if people entered their own data it was more likely to be correct and there would be less data entry errors. It also spread the burden out to the people who will actually swim so the data entry load doesn’t fall on just one person. Using Hy-tek requires setting up swim meets so there is some admin work on that side as well. It isn’t something you just open up the tool and figure out.

      What is your end goal and what do you have in place that can help you?

  2. All of the athlete information (swim id number, name, birthdate, gender, event, time, etc.) will be entered on a website for their registration. Our hope is to take that data from the website registration and format it into an Excel .csv file to then enter into Hytek. We do not want to have to enter it into Hytek manually. Any help would be appreciated.

    • Since Hy-tek won’t read an Excel file you will need to get your data into a Hy-tek format. Do you want to import a roster or entries for a swim meet with events? Do you want to import into Meet Manager or Team Manager? You need to provide some more specific details in order to he you out.

      What platform is your registration web server run on? What database? If you are running PHP you may be able to adapt the WordPress code I have for creating Hy-tek entry files. I know of one group which used the algorithm and re-wrote it in ASP to work on their platform.

      If you are a Excel VBA programmer you could probably do it in Excel too. Whatever you do, the end results must be something Hy-tek will read which means a .hy3 file or a .re1 file.

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