Hi Colin,
Thanks for your reply and support. It seems that we can achieve what we
need and perhaps provide some more exposure for your software in the
process.
Regarding downloading registration lists, CSV files would work great. I
guess all I really need is some direction as to how you need me to lay it
out for easy integration. If it is possible to add extra fields, that would
be terrific, primarily for when the results are posted back to the Tornado
website. It would be very helpful to add a regatta ID.
Regarding Sailor ID's and publishing, we would like to publish something
that includes links to member profiles on the Tornado class site ahead of
the ISAF Sailor ID links. The reason I saw for using the ISAF Sailor ID's
is that it would provide for a field with unique values that can be
referenced to our data (we could require that members get ISAF Sailor ID's).
The other way for us to achieve this would be to add another field in the
results scoring for Tornado member id's.
Regarding a plug-in for publishing, I believe for security reasons, the best
option would be to build in an app (XML would work) that can load results
into a field in our database. We would also require a user id and password.
This way, we could display results straight out of our database without
having to use frames on our site, and we could control access on a per event
basis without worrying about the security of our FTP server. I envision
having the plug-in call up a page on our site and enter the results data
into a specified field, and enter the regatta id into another field. The
results data would consist of html code(probably a table) but not an entire
html document. The person providing the results would then enter their user
id and password in the fields on our site and click the submit button. On
our end, we would check the id and password against the regatta id and then
add the results to the database upon verification. I'm curious to know your
thoughts.
We are still in the planning stages of this, so the specific methods are not
really nailed down. The most important considerations are making it easy to
use, ensure that we can link members with results, and keeping it portable
for the foreseeable future as your software changes.
Thanks again for your help.
Noah Purves-Smith
noah@ursudio.com
www.ursudio.com
Message: 3
···
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 10:14:06 -0000
From: "Colin Jenkins" <colin@sailwave.com>
Subject: RE: Creating a Plug-In for the International Tornado Class
Hi Noah,
Thanks for your interest in Sailwave; as a cat sailor I would be especially
happy to get involved...
Downloading the database into a format suitable for incorporation into
Sailwave should not, as you say, be a problem. However I'd prefer to keep
the .blw syntax my own so that I can change it an any time - one thing I'm
hoping to do for example is move to XML instead of my own file format -
which'll make the files portable across other apps as well. In the short
term I would say the best option is to create a file in CSV format and
import it into Sailwave. I can make the importing as painless as possible
so that it's not too much hassle. This can be done now, but you may need
some more fields. Note that Sailwave uses ISAF Sailor IDs now and displays
them as hyperlinks in the results when displaying Helm/Crew information.
WRT the Plug-In, that's no problem either except that at present "plug-ins"
are actually hard-wired bits of code! - the name reflects where I want to
take them... If you can give me example of the format you require I can
create the plug-in for you.
The ability to upload directly to a web site is something that will appear
in Sailwave soon as planned development using ftp so a user and password
will be required, unless you allow anonymous FTP.
Hope this helps...
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Colin J
www.sailwave.com