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.

In theory, SDIF (Swim Data Interchange Format) should address this issues.  SDIF is a standard published by USA Swimming.  If you visit the USA Swimming web site and search for SDIF, you won’t find much.  The SDIF 3.0 specification is pretty old, it was published in 1998.

There is a page which references the newer XSDIF specification but I am not aware of any swim software which currently supports it.  So in reality, the 3.0 version of the SDIF specification (this is a very poorly formatted document – if you’d like a better version, download the SDIF specification from the WinSwim web site) remains the standard to work with.

If you are interested sharing ideas, solutions, problems, etc. with others who are trying to solve similar problems, please join the SDIF Forum Google Group.  It seems like there are quite a few people trying to solve similar problems, the Google Group should help people communicate.

As it relates to wp-SwimTeam, one of the first things I need to solve is the ability to upload a Hy-tek Events File and connect the events to a swim meet.  This is necessary in order to upload results for a meet and connect them to a swimmer.  This information could be extracted from a results file but Hy-tek events files are frequently available so I want to leverage the information they contain.

Being able to engage in a dialog on how to parse the .hyv or .hy3 files would be really helpful for me, I am sure it would be beneficial to others as well.  In many cases, someone has probably already written a script or Excel macro to extract the information.  I can’t imagine how many times the wheel is being reinvented – I am guessing lots!

I posted previously on this topic but this year, as I was preparing our entries for the Cary City Meet, I did some experiments.  Hy-tek now makes a demo version of Meet Manager available.  The demo version is limited to six (6) events which makes it useless for doing much real work but it is fine for some simple experiments like I wanted to do.

What did I learn?

Meet Manager is really picky about SDIF.  This really isn’t a surprise.  The first thing I ran into was SDIF files (which are ASCII) that go through e-mail as simple attachments rarely will read into Meet Manager successfully.  There is something about line endings that Meet Manager is unusually sensitive too.  This issue can be avoided by zipping an SDIF file before sending it via e-mail.  You can actually load the zip file into Meet Manager directly, Meet Manager will unzip it for you.

The real compatibility issue comes from D0 and E0 SDIF records which don’t have a seed time.  Meet Manager simply does not like records without a seed time (blank) even though the SDIF specification indicates this is legal.

To get past this issue, the SDIF file must contain either “NT” or “00:00.0″ (right justified) in the seed time field AND the course code.  Meet Manager will accept both formats as “no seed time”.

Unfortunately Meet Manager still does not read heat and lane information from the SDIF record.  This is really a nuisance.  As near as I can tell the only way to get heat and lane information into Meet Manager is via a .CL2 file (maybe) or via a .HY3 file (definitely).  Of course both of these file formats, which are similar to SDIF, contain the Hy-tek proprietary checkum for each record.

I would really like to solve this problem as it would make interchanging data so much easier.

Fortunately Hy-tek now has a demo version of Meet Manager available which while limited to 6 events, is useful for testing in a limited fashion.  For example, I was able to verify that the MM RE1 export from wp-SwimTeam will load in Meet Manager.  I was also able to test quite a few permutations of SDIF E0 and D0 records until I figured out what combination of course and seed times would load successfully.

Now that I know what works I am considering adding a couple utilities that will apply changes to an uploaded SDIF file and send it back for download.  If you have ideas for SDIF manipulations that need to be made, drop a note in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

The first one I will do will modify SDIF files to include seed times (which are optional per the SDIF specification) when the fields are blank.

1. It is now possible to export a single swimmer’s record to CSV of SDIF.  When a single swimmer is selected, the exported file will contain the information for just that swimmer.  When no swimmers are selected, the entire roster will be exported.  Single swimmer SDIF export is useful for importing late additions into WinSwim which is something I’ve had to do a few times this week.
2. The LSC Registration Pyramid (SDIF) can now be generated using the Age Group Age (computed base on cut off date) instead of the swimmer’s true age.  By default the real age is exported which is what wp-SwimTeam has done traditionally.  If you want to use the computed Age Group Age, change the setting on the SDIF Profile tab from the Options menu.

A new version, v0.2.486, of wp-SwimTeam is available for download from the Download page.

Updating a season now allows a prior year to be selected – the year range now shows 3 years prior and 7 years after the current year.  Most of the success and error messages now use the Wordpress styling where they appear near the top of the page in a colored box.  There are probably a few I missed but most of them should work correctly.

This release also exposes the start of the results import although it doesn’t currently do anything other than load the file and do some basic parsing on it to make sure it is a valid SDIF results file.  The data is not currently stored in the database.

I also fixed another issue with optional fields (user and swimmer) where if the number of fields in use was set to 0 in the Options settings, the system would revert to the default (5) number of fields.

Over the past week or so I have also posted a couple updates without posting an announcement.  Most of the improvements were in the reporting and SDIF generation.  Reports for Swim Meets can now include multiple meets on the same report and the SDIF options page has a new option to allow overriding the first name with the nickname when exporting the roster in SDIF format.