Tag Archives: SDIF

07.03.10
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SDIF Utilities?

I am considering adding some SDIF utilities to wp-SwimTeam.  Just this week I have had to deal with submitting meet entry data to a team who uses Meet Manager.  Ugh.  Everytime I have to do this it reinforces my dislike for the Hy-tek products.

Fortunately Hy-tek now has a demo version of Meet Manager available which while limited to 6 events, is useful for testing in a limited fashion.  For example, I was able to verify that the MM RE1 export from wp-SwimTeam will load in Meet Manager.  I was also able to test quite a few permutations of SDIF E0 and D0 records until I figured out what combination of course and seed times would load successfully.

Now that I know what works I am considering adding a couple utilities that will apply changes to an uploaded SDIF file and send it back for download.  If you have ideas for SDIF manipulations that need to be made, drop a note in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

The first one I will do will modify SDIF files to include seed times (which are optional per the SDIF specification) when the fields are blank.

06.12.10
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wp-SwimTeam v0.2.486 now available

A couple of new features have been added to wp-SwimTeam.

  1. It is now possible to export a single swimmer’s record to CSV of SDIF.  When a single swimmer is selected, the exported file will contain the information for just that swimmer.  When no swimmers are selected, the entire roster will be exported.  Single swimmer SDIF export is useful for importing late additions into WinSwim which is something I’ve had to do a few times this week.
  2. The LSC Registration Pyramid (SDIF) can now be generated using the Age Group Age (computed base on cut off date) instead of the swimmer’s true age.  By default the real age is exported which is what wp-SwimTeam has done traditionally.  If you want to use the computed Age Group Age, change the setting on the SDIF Profile tab from the Options menu.

A new version, v0.2.486, of wp-SwimTeam is available for download from the Download page.

03.16.10
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wp-SwimTeam 0.1.442 available

This evening I posted a v0.1.442 of wp-SwimTeam on the download page.  There isn’t a lot of new functionality which is visible yet but this released fixes a couple things I ran into getting ready for the MacDolphins 2010 season.

Updating a season now allows a prior year to be selected – the year range now shows 3 years prior and 7 years after the current year.  Most of the success and error messages now use the WordPress styling where they appear near the top of the page in a colored box.  There are probably a few I missed but most of them should work correctly.

This release also exposes the start of the results import although it doesn’t currently do anything other than load the file and do some basic parsing on it to make sure it is a valid SDIF results file.  The data is not currently stored in the database.

06.11.09
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wp-SwimTeam v0.1.406 – fixes to reports

This evening I posted a new build of wp-SwimTeam to the downloads page.  This version fixes an unusual situation where the swimmer reports would fail to work when no optional swimmer fields we defined.

I also fixed another issue with optional fields (user and swimmer) where if the number of fields in use was set to 0 in the Options settings, the system would revert to the default (5) number of fields.

Over the past week or so I have also posted a couple updates without posting an announcement.  Most of the improvements were in the reporting and SDIF generation.  Reports for Swim Meets can now include multiple meets on the same report and the SDIF options page has a new option to allow overriding the first name with the nickname when exporting the roster in SDIF format.

01.16.09
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Demonstration for TSA

I have been asked to demonstrate the MacDolphins‘ web based Swim Team registration system (which is wp-SwimTeam) to the Tarheel Swimming Association at one of their upcoming board meetings.

I will we out of town for work for their February meeting so it looks like it will be in March which should give me sufficient time and motivation to finish up a lot of the unfinished work.  I really need to get to work on a sample theme too – the theme I am currently using on the MacDolphins site is not widget ready which is a big limitation.

05.18.08
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Fixes to SDIF, Age calculation, and other stuff

It has been a pretty hectic week for Swim Team and as such, I have found some bugs and some minor annoyances and tried to fix most of them.  The most serious bug was in the SDIF export which I was working with one of our coaches on so he could started working with WinSwim with our roster.  If the parent profile wasn’t entered, the last last profile found was being used to construct the D1 and D2 records.  Now when a parent profile record isn’t found, it reverts to the site admin’s record to populate the data.

I also switched a bunch of the swimmer lists (roster, all swimmers) back to sorting by last name because that is how the data is usually looked at.  I also fixed a bug in the age computation which was rather elusive – it only appeared once in a while.  It turns out the logic was wrong in an age computation function I had grabbed off a PHP site a while back.  Lastly, I made progress on the swimmer id/number/label but am not yet computing them.  I think all of the infrastructure for them is down now.

04.09.08
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Kudos to WinSwim

Yesterday I completed the first pass of exporting a LSC Registration Pyramid SDIF file.  Since I only have the demo versions of the Hy-Tek tools (Team Manager and Meet Manager), I sent the SDIF file to the support contact I have been working with at Hy-Tek.  Meet Manager can’t read the file which makes sense because it contains roster information, not meet entries.  Team Manager can’t read it either because it doesn’t import SDIF.  Great.  It turns out Hy-Tek really only supports a subset of SDIF.  Now what do I do?

When I first started looking into this problem, I found a couple other similar applications which manage swim team rosters and meets.  One was from EasyWare, the other from WinSwim.  I tried to import the data into WinSwim and didn’t have much luck.  I then sent the file to their support e-mail address and hoped I had simply made a mistake in my SDIF file.  I got a nice reply stating that WinSwim didn’t support the LSC Registation Pyramid and suggested I structure my file a little differently OR use their ASCII import method.

The ASCII import method didn’t look too difficult but instead of tackling it last night, I played Rock Band with my son.  I am really glad I played Rock Band instead of working ont he plugin!  This morning I woke up to an e-mail asking me to download and try a new version of WinSwim which support the LSC registration pyramid.  Yeah!  I installed it and imported my sample data without any issues.  How cool is that?  Unless I run into a problem, I expect our  team will make an investment in WinSwim instead of Hy-Tek.

04.08.08
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It shouldn’t be this hard …

Today I finished the first pass on generating an SDIF file for the roster.  I sent it to Hy-Tek and it doesn’t import.  Great.  Apparently they don’t seem to support all of the SDIF specification, just some of it.  No mention of that anywhere on their web site.

On the plus side, I found a better version of the SDIF specification on the WinSwim web site.  If I can get WinSwim to digest the SDIF file I generated, I may push our team to use it.