I get a fair number of questions about how to import swim team data from one place to another. Most of these questions are from people like me who have information in one place and want to figure out how to use it again without having to type it in again.
In theory, SDIF (Swim Data Interchange Format) should address this issues. SDIF is a standard published by USA Swimming. If you visit the USA Swimming web site and search for SDIF, you won’t find much. The SDIF 3.0 specification is pretty old, it was published in 1998.
There is a page which references the newer XSDIF specification but I am not aware of any swim software which currently supports it. So in reality, the 3.0 version of the SDIF specification (this is a very poorly formatted document – if you’d like a better version, download the SDIF specification from the WinSwim web site) remains the standard to work with.
If you are interested sharing ideas, solutions, problems, etc. with others who are trying to solve similar problems, please join the SDIF Forum Google Group. It seems like there are quite a few people trying to solve similar problems, the Google Group should help people communicate.
As it relates to wp-SwimTeam, one of the first things I need to solve is the ability to upload a Hy-tek Events File and connect the events to a swim meet. This is necessary in order to upload results for a meet and connect them to a swimmer. This information could be extracted from a results file but Hy-tek events files are frequently available so I want to leverage the information they contain.
Being able to engage in a dialog on how to parse the .hyv or .hy3 files would be really helpful for me, I am sure it would be beneficial to others as well. In many cases, someone has probably already written a script or Excel macro to extract the information. I can’t imagine how many times the wheel is being reinvented – I am guessing lots!