wp-SwimTeam v1.24.846 now available

This afternoon I posted an update to wp-SwimTeam.  This release, v1.24.846, addresses a couple of issues.

  1. In ability to add a new season to a new installation.  Made it kind of hard to get started!  This bug was introduced when I added action checking and the action checking on the Seasons had a flaw in it.
  2. Added B1 and B2 records to the SDIF export of Meet Entries.  These records are required and I had simply overlooked them.  The Meet Entries successfully import into WinSwim, I hope to validate with Team Manager in the next day or two.

WordPress multi-site is not functional at this time.  I’ve been alerted to a bug which I am chasing which prevents the Users from being displayed.  Access to the user tables is critical and multi-site handles it differently than regular WordPress does so I need to account for it.

wp-SwimTeam v1.22.831 now available

This evening I committed v.122 of wp-SwimTeam to the WordPress plugin repository.  This update completes the work I started about a month ago to overhaul the Event Model and add the ability to Export Meet entries in SDIF format such that they can be imported directly into any of the Meet Management applications.

I have made a lot of changes while working on this new functionality.  If you run into anything unusual, please let me know ASAP so I can fix it.

  • Added new Team Profile field to identify Coach by WordPress username.
  • Fixed numerous potential issues when either Swimmer or User option count was set to zero. The comparison was not accounting for the difference between zero and non-existant which resulted in using the default value of 5 in many instances.
  • Initial support for Meet Entries SDIF export. The current implementation makes some assumptions which will eventually be under user control via a form. The exported SDIF validates with the WinSwim SDIF Checker application but has not been tested extensively with any of the Hy-tek tools nor with WinSwim itself.
  • Added checking and error messages for all Actions to ensure something is selected when required.
  • Added GUI for Meet Entries Export.

Export Meet Entries from wp-SwimTeam!

For the last week or so I’ve been working on a significant chunk of new functionality to export a Meet Entries file directly from wp-SwimTeam.  I’ve got a preliminary version of it working and I am able to generate a SDIF file which passes validation with the WinSwim SDIF Checker (which is absolutely invaluable if you work with SDIF data!).

The current implementation makes some assumptions (e.g. how zero times should be handled) which need to be under the control of the end user via a form. Now that I have it working, building the form should go pretty quickly.

The basic premise of exporting meet entries works is like this:

For each event in a swim meet (a meet must have a set of events connected to it), the active roster is compared against the scratch list and the remaining eligible swimmers have entries created for them.  For relay events, all eligible swimmers are listed as alternate swimmers for the ‘A’ relay team.  Once the entries are in your Meet Management tool, you can re-arrange swimmers into lanes and heats as you would normally do.

I know this new feature will save our team a ton of time as we try to reconcile our scratch list against the WinSwim database – now we won’t have to.  We’ll just import the entries and not have to worry about activating or deactivating swimmers.

I’ve also fixed a number of bugs so I am considering releasing an update with the functionality as it stands so people can try it out.  The bugs would be most obvious when either the User or Swimmer option count was set to zero.  In a number of places, the comparison was wrong and it result in using the default number of options which is 5.

 

wp-SwimTeam v1.19 beta available for testing

I flew out to Phoenix and back this week and had some airplane time to work on wp-SwimTeam.  I have completed what I am calling “Phase 2” of the Event Model changes.  Events can now be assigned to a swim meet AND the Opt-In/Opt-Out system is working in the Event Mode (which I had broken in v1.18).

The majority of the work in this build is related to Events and their connection to swim meets which is the precursor to Phase 3 which will be the generation of Meet Entries in SDIF format that can be imported into tools like MeetManager and WinSwim.  I have also fixed quite a few bugs in the report manager which were present when either the User or Swimmer option count was set to zero.  There was some logic that didn’t test right and would result in using the default count which is 5.  So if you have seen checkboxes without labels on the User or Swimmer report generator, this has been fixed.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.  I am doing some testing with our team right now and we have our pre-season open house this weekend which tends to result in a good chunk of our registrations.  Assuming all goes well, I’ll release an update to the WordPress repository early next week if not sooner.

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Gearing up for Swim Team 2012

It will be summer swim team season before I know it so it is time to start gearing up for the upcoming season.  I haven’t really looked at wp-SwimTeam since last fall and WordPress has had several updates since then. I found out today that one of the updates causes the “real name” for the users not to be returned so that is first on my list of things to fix.  There are also some GUI inconsistencies that I’d like to fix.

This is my short list of items which I want to implement this season:

  1. New/update Swim Team theme.  This really isn’t related to wp-SwimTeam per se but our site is looking a little dated and it is time to freshen it up.
  2. Results Import:  I said I was going to do this last season and I never finished it.  I really want to get this done this year.
  3. Export of Meet Entries:  The wp-SwimTeam plugin has all of the informtation (roster, scratch list, event list, etc.) to generate a Meet Entries file in SDIF format.  Providing this file will greatly simplify getting a team’s entries into either Hy-tek or WinSwim (or any other tool which imports meet entries).  This will likely be first on my list after fixing the name bug and the GUI inconsistencies.
  4. Document all of the short codes on the wp-SwimTeam demo site.  I really need to do this.  It would make it much easier for new people to pick up the plugin and do something useful with it quickly.

More thoughts on the Opt-In/Opt-Out changes

I’ve made a fair amount of progress today on the new Opt-In/Opt-Out Event model.  One of the big benefits of this model is it will facilitate being able to generate a Meet Entries file (SDIF) which could be consumed by Hy-tek Meet Manager or WinSwim.

The meet event information has been in wp-SwimTeam for quite some time but I’ve yet to do anything with it as other things, like the Jobs system, have taken priority.  Knowing which swimmers are registered for which event will make the generation of a Meet Entries file fairly straight forward to implement.

What isn’t in v1.6.605?

The major feature that I had been working on which I didn’t complete is the ability to generate a Jobs vs. Commitment report.  The Jobs module allows each job to assigned some number of credits and there is a setting to set the minimum number of credits each user is responsible for.  By default the system will use zero which means there isn’t a minimum.  In the latest release, when a user looks at their My Jobs tab, it will show the jobs they have committed to and sum up the credits.  If the sum of the credits is less than the minimum, an error notification will be displayed for the user.

Right now this message is only displayed on the My Jobs tab but an administrator will also see it when view selecting the Jobs action for any user from the Manage->Users tab.  I had given some thought to displaying the notification anytime a user logged in but have conclude that would be too intrusive.  I may make it an optional setting at some point though.

The one thing I haven’t figured out is how to handle a situation like we have with our own team. On our team we ask each family to volunteer four times (four credits) for the season regardless of how many swimmers they have.  If both parents are in the system (primary and secondary contacts) right now they would be erroneously flagged if each signed up for two jobs because together, they have met our requirement.

Reporting  job commitments versus user is pretty easy and I will do that in the next few days but I have also considered reporting job commitments versus swimmer so that both contacts can be accounted for.  In speaking with some teams locally, they require two volunteer commitments per swimmer so that is yet another permutation to account for.  In the short term I will likely only report commitments versus users and leave it at that for now and revisit it after the season as there are some other things I need for our season which starts in three weeks:  Results, Meet Entries, and some work on WinSwim/Hy-tek interoperability.

I like DropBox

I’ve expressed my disdain for a number of things, primarily Hy-tek’s poor SDIF support in this forum so I guess it is appropriate that I also note some things I find useful and work well.  DropBox is one of them.  It solves a problem and solves it very well.

A lot of swim team files are shared among a group of people and e-mailing them around can be problematic.  We’re using DropBox to share some of the files and I am planning to store our WinSwim database in DropBox so the Swim Team’s computer and my computer will have access to the same database file.  I am optimistic that doing this will allow us to collaborate on the meet line up and heat sheet process without having to mail files around.  I’ll report back later on how it works out.

In the mean time, if you want to check out DropBox (free for 2GB of storage), use this DropBox referal link and I will get some extra space as will you when you sign up!

Swim Team results analysis tool

Periodically I search for new swim team related software to see if anyone else is trying to solve the problems I am trying to solve.  Today I found something interesting called Natalog.  Natalog is from a company called Natavision and it is a swim results viewing and analysis tool.

I think much of what this tool can do is available in Crystal Reports but this looks to be much easier and certainly something a parent or coach might find useful.  It takes a variety of input formats including SDIF (.sd3), Hy-tek, and plain text.  Since it accepts SDIF, it can report WinSwim results very easily.

I am slowly adding reporting functionality to wp-SwimTeam and I doubt I will ever do anything to this extent.

Heat Sheet Builder Excel Workbook v1.1

When our coaching staff constructed their heat sheet by hand they always wrote it up as a matrix with the heats on the vertical axis and the lanes on the horizontal axis.  This style of heat sheet matches the layout of the pool and the way the kids line up as they get ready to swim.

Now that we are doing all of our seeding using WinSwim, we no longer have the matrix style heat sheet and many of our parents have asked if we can get the heat sheet in that format.

After playing around with Crystal Reports for a while I concluded that it would easier to develop an Excel workbook to construct the heat sheet than it would be to get Crystal Reports to do it.  I am sure CR can do it but I don’t know how and I needed something this season!

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The Excel workbook I developed consumes the output of the Custom Report Meet Heat Sheet by Event (CSV) that I developed and posted previously (make sure you download the update as I changed the report recently).

The workbook requires Excel 2007 to run.  It will actually run in Excel 2003 if you load the Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003 however the sorting functions are disabled so you’ll have to do your own sorting.

There are some controls over the width and height of the cells that comprise the heat sheet and page breaks will be inserted after every three events.  They can be adjusted using Excel’s standard page break functionality.

Heat Sheet Buildervv1.1, last updated on 2009-07-06

Download a sample heat sheet which was generated with Heat Sheet Builder.

Heat Sheet Builder Samplev07-05, last updated on 2009-07-06

Download the collection of Custom Reports for WinSwim.

WinSwim Custom Reportsv07-05, last updated on 2009-07-06

This Excel workbook is free to download – there is sample data included in it, before using it I would suggest looking at the Heat Sheet CSV tab to see the format of the data once it is imported from the CSV file.