drneau.com

[drneau]

Now that I'm nearly done with the PayoutSchedule for v3, I'm starting to think about the Player DB.

In v2, the entity of a "player" really lives inside a tournament...and the only thing I'm tracking about a player is their name. If you make a tournament part of a league, the league ranker just considers anyone with the same name to be the same person (which is why you have to "merge" players if you use two different names for the same person).

In v2, a player database is just a list of players that you can copy into your player list.

What I'm thinking for v3...

The player DB will be the source for player information. It will track and control the following attributes for each player:
- ID
- First Name
- Last Name
- Nickname
- Display Name
- Birthday
- Email Address
- Phone
- Address1
- Address2
- City
- State
- ZipPostalCode
- Country
- InternalID (internal to the app and never seen by you, the user)

A player will be uniquely identified within a DB by a combination of their First Name, Last Name and ID.

Display name would be one of the following:
- <First Name> + <Last Name>
- <First Name> + <Last Name> + (<ID>)
- <Nickname> + (<ID>)
- Anything else you want

Tournaments will no longer track player data directly. Instead, they'll just use the "InternalID" for each player. A tournament will use a specific player database.



The implications of this?
- If you are someone who is relying on the format of the tournament file directly, this will matter to you. Any reference to a player will now be by an "InternalID" which is actually resolved in the associated player database file. To help with this, I'd probably have a way of saving a tournament into a "tournament results" XML file which could be parsed by any program and would have all required information in it directly.
- All tournaments within a league must use the same player database. In fact, I'm considering having one player database per repository just to make things less confusing...but I'll noodle on that some more. If I don't have one player database per repository, then I'll need to worry about how to handle two tournaments that used different player databases.
_________________
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Dr. Neau (not a real doctor)
http://drneau.com
http://home.comcast.net/~jneau

[rastapete]

I have nothing useful to say on this topic. I use one league, and one Player DB, so I don't think what's being proposed would affect me much.

But, Doc, you've been developing v3 'in the dark' for a couple of months now, and users haven't had anything to ooh & aah over (except in concept). But I want to just let you know that I (we, if I can be presumptuous) appreciate your efforts and very much look forward to taking v3 out for a spin.

[jalsing]

I think as far as Database theories go, the players should be identified only by their unique ID. Thus they could conceiveably change any or all of the other attributes (including First/Last Name) and still be the same player.

[drneau]

[i8dbear]

for those of us for whom the player ID is an extraneous formality, may I suggest that the app have the ability (and the selectable option) to automatically assign a unique id to a new player when s/he is created. that would abrogate the need for us to come up with and track our own id systems.

may i also suggest that display options include the ability to sort by first name OR last name, and that we have the display option to show "First Name, Nickname, Lastname," as in Nelson "ThirdStreet" Handel.

also, with regard to email functionality, it would be maximally convenient ot have the ability to send an email to all registered players automatically, and , for that matter, to send an email to all players in the DB automatically. this would greatly simplify tournament notification and updates. if the app can't email directly, could it interface with external email programs, and, short of that, export a txt file containing email addresses only, which then could be copied into an email. These features would greatly simplify tournament management.

and now for the piéce de résistance, is there any way the app could interface with a web-based sign-up tool? I use a perl script to allow online sign-up, which generates a .txt data file with player name and email address and tourney. if there was some way that the app could interface with such a tool, or if you wrote a script that would allow it to do so, you would achieve stellar orbit.

managing people is the most time-consuming part of pre-tournament preparations.

thanks, Doc,

Happy fourth of July.