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.