Sparkline charts generated from Sailwave files

General
1

Last year I wrote a program that will generate Sparkline charts from a Sailwave file. To accomplish this I received a lot of assistance and encouragement from Jon and Huw.

Sparkline explanation: Sparkline - Wikipedia

The program has many features such as highlighting sailors based on a criteria, a bar graph of the number of boats entered in each race, highlighting the top boats, custom highlighting, dynamic labeling, custom labeling, etc.

Here is a link to some of the chart types it can generate: Raw Race Results Sheets | 2022 WesMex

The way the program works is that it prompts you for the Sailwave file and it will then open the file and read the contents. For every race, starting with the last race, it rescores the results, collects the ranks and points of the boats, deletes the race and repeats this. After the first race it will close the Sailwave file without saving it.

It will detect if the series is part of a qualifying / final series and prompts you for the Sailwave file that contains the qualifying part. This is because the scoring set up is changed when a series moves from the qualifying to the final series.

You can access and download the program from the following two links:
http://jpvm.org/Race%20Management/Peter%20van%20Muyden%20race%20management%20tools/Programs/Sparkline_generator.exe

I’ve created a small help file: http://jpvm.org/Race%20Management/Peter%20van%20Muyden%20race%20management%20tools/Programs/Sailwave_sparkline_generator.html

After the download just click on the file and it will install on your computer.

Keep in mind that this program is not supported by Jon, even though he is always willing to help me when needed.

Let me know if you have any problems or would like to see other functionality.

Peter

2

Hi SUG Members,
Yesterday I sent Peter a Sailwave file because it was taking a long time to process.

Peter investigated and I had excluded competitors in the file which had not been thought of. So a quick delete of the excluded competitors and everything is fine.

An updated version to filter out excluded competitors may come.

Kind regards,
Huw

3

This is great.

I have been making this chart manually using a spreadsheet and it is tedious. I too found myself waiting for a response for several minutes before reading about the need to delete the excluded entries.

A couple items I am seeing in my use… I am running this under Crossover on a Mac, so whooo knows what that does. But I have not found a way to change the title of the Sparkline chart, no matter what I enter into item “4”. It seems locked to use only the event title. Nor can I change the line labels from sail no. to the boat name (%boat%) in item “27”.

Note, my Sailwave files embed some html codes in the event title (%event%) since I publish results to a website, so finding a way to filter those <…> codes out of the event title would be good, or being able to change the title in item 4.

4

Hi Matt,
I am currently testing a newer version for Peter which takes account of excluded competitors.

I am not able to change the title when using natively on Windows.

Kind regards,
Huw

5

Hi Huw and Matt,

Both the Title and Line label change for me, but you have to press the enter key after changing the data for each of them. I need to find a solution that when the focus changes from the text box that the text is accepted without pressing the enter key.

Stripping the HTML code from the Title string is a bit easier.

Thanks for testing it.
Peter

6

Yes… hitting the enter/return key after changing the title does result in the typed in text taking effect as expected. Also, success with changing %sailno% to %boat%.

I sent Peter my BLW file to test his approach to ignoring the excluded competitors and stripping out embedded HTML format codes within <…> characters. In my case, using Peter’s recent test code, It started to process the BLW file, but then the program returned some error messages, which I copied to Peter.

7

Matt,

I didn’t receive your BLW file and error log. You can email it to pvanmuyden at gmail.com.

Peter

8

I e-mailed you a screen capture movie and some answers to the questions. Let me know if you did not get it. This forum does not let me upload the movie file.

9

For Mac users, this program works with Sailwave using Crossover to interpret the Windows instructions. I installed the program into the same “bottle” as Sailwave. However, for me, the program sometimes hangs up after reading the .BLW file and at the point it is just beginning to backup through results, eliminating the “last” race to successively recalculate the rankings. But don’t despair if the program hangs up here and returns a few error messages. Quit the program and restart it using another .BLW file, or restart Crossover, or even try restarting the computer. Then go back to the file you are trying to process. Usually, one of these work-arounds will result in the program completing normally and generating the sparkline graph and then you can try it on the file you are interested in. The reason(s) for the seemingly random hang-up are not yet known. But, even with this minor issue, it is much faster than trying to create this graph using a spreadsheet.

10

An updated version V1.1 has been uploaded. This version contains the following changes:

  • It fixes the “excluded sailors” bug by ignoring those sailors.
  • The title and label enter data fields don’t require you the press the enter key anymore
  • A “
    ” string will be replaced by a blank character and all other HTML code will be removed

As Matt stated the Mac bug still exists, but he found a work around. I don’t have access to a Mac which makes it rather hard to debug it.

http://jpvm.org/Race%20Management/Peter%20van%20Muyden%20race%20management%20tools/Programs/Sparkline_generator.exe