Huw, yes, it's a bit wierd. Happens when we truncate Laser number
from their class issued 6 digit numbers to a more practical last-four
character field. So we record "180572" as "0572", etc. They often
have different coloured letters for the first two chars. Makes life
much nicer on the finishing line for the recorders. Have to check to
make sure there aren't duplicates in the "16", "17" or "18" series, of
course. Strangely, we have a bag of 29ers around here that seem to use
three number chars, like "CAN 029".
Anyway, with respect, I think it's not quite what you describe. I
think SW is looking at these as numbers rather than text chars.
Hence, to get "0571", one enters "571" and it displays the correct
number in the wizard. It's sort of counter-intuitive that they are
handled as numbers.
The switch that disregards the nationality chars seems to work well.
I can enter CAN 275 and USA 3721 by just entering 275 and 3721 into
the wizard, so that's not an issue.
That being said, I'll bet that changing sail numbers to a text field
is a pretty fundamental and somewhat large task, so again, it probably
isn't the greatest priority in the world. But for the first regatta
of the spring, when I've forgotten the trick of skipping the leading
zero, it can be a bit frightening when we're trying to get results out
in a hurry.
Some day, when there is lots of time on hand, perhaps Colin might give
it a look. I do think that treating sail numbers as text is
fundamentally better, but happily, I'm not charged with making it
happen. There was a day, but no longer . . . .
Thanks,
jrc
John,
I would have said having a sail number starting with 0 (zero) is
weird 
Sailwave I think treats the Sail Number column as text because I
think quite
a few include the MNA letters in this field and not put them in the
nationality column, slightly quicker to enter. Also I don't think
Sailwave
originally had a separate field for Nationality, therefore text ordering
does the type of sorting you see.
Kind regards,
Huw
From: sailwave@yahoogroups.com [mailto:sailwave@yahoogroups.com]On
Behalf
Of John Culter
Sent: 30 July 2008 17:53
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sailwave] Sail numbers start with zero?
This is a post from a few months ago -- #7888. Don't remember seeing
a response.
jrc
I think this is an old topic, but couldn't find anything in the
archives.
···
--- In sailwave@yahoogroups.com, "Huw Pearce" <huw.pearce@...> wrote:
-----Original Message-----
Just finished using Sailwave to score the Seattle NOOD -- 225 boats, 3
courses, 22 classes. SW performed beautifully, as expected, but for
one thing: Sail num wizard doesn't accept sail numbers like '0710'.
The work around is to just enter '710', dropping the leading zero.
Which was okay once I remembered, after some Very Anxious Moments.
But zero is a number, yes, just like the other nine digits?
A related issue, not too important, is that clicking on the SailNbr
column gets a sort like this:
002
013
23
55
074
0174
192
etc.
Not sure what's going on. Looks like sail numbers are sometimes
numeric, sometimes text. Weird.
This with SW 1.95 Build 7.
jrc