Sail 100 Auto Link Produced - Spring 2007

One of the most significant features of the SailRacer system has been its ability to handle race results in a variety of formats and from different sources.

The SailRacer system allows event organisers to paste their race results (and reports) from different Race Scoring programmes, including Sailwave, Sail 100 and HAL Race Results, also other inputs such as results in Excel spreadsheets, MS Word documents and HTML web pages.

One of the development objectives was to make the link between the Race Programmes and SailRacer as transparent as possible, so I started discussions with the various developers to work out the technological solutions.

Bob at Sail 100 was first off the mark with a publish option to send results straight to SailRacer at the click of a button

www.sailracer.co.uk

RYA see the light - Spring 2007

With all the RYA Youth (Laser, 420, 29er, Hobie) and Junior (Cadet, Mirror, Topper, Optimist) Dinghy Classes covered in the SailRacer Results database, and an extensive archive of data, the RYA were quick to spot the opportunity of tracking our up and coming sailors via SailRacer.

Importantly as the system covers all classes, it is very easy to follow progress of sailors as they progress through the classes.

The RYA asked all the classes to upload their own results

SailRacer at the 2007 RYA Youth Nationals

It soon became clear that the SailRacer system could play an important role in managing results during an event. The opportunity to test this fast became available at the 2007 RYA Youth Nationals, which utilised SailRacer to manage the results.

SailRacer was able to offer the following functions :

• Entry list linked to results archive, allowing results for all competitors to be easily displayed


• Event results displayed on a daily basis


• Automatic indexing of the results


• Search on sailor facility


• Reports and photo upload

See http://www.sailracer.co.uk/youthnats.asp

The system certainly made the handling of results and reports very easy.

From a technical perspective much was learnt from managing the results for 2007 Youth Nationals, it soon became clear that from mid afternoon there was a massive surge in web traffic as people logged onto the site to find the latest results. Routines were put into place to cache results to improve performance.

SailRacer Opens - Spring 2007

Once the results handling system I had created for the Mirror Class had been expanded to handle other classes and sailing results submissions from a wide variety of people and formats http://www.sailracer.co.uk/ was ready to go live in Spring 2007.





Early featured included :

• Display full results for individual events


• Display list of events that met a particular search criteria eg all Laser events in 2007


• Search by sailor


• Search by boat


• Search by sailing club


• Search by year


• Search by mixture of above


• Analysis tools to allow the comparison of two sailors, showing when they had competed against each other and which had finished ahead, with final counts totaling number of times each sailor had achieved a higher ranking (see screen shot)

A key part of http://www.sailracer.co.uk/ is allow people to post their results in a variety of formats, so far we have seen race results submitted from the following sources :

• SailWave Race Results Programme
• Sail100 Race Results Programme
• HAL Race Results Programme
• Excel
• Word
• Text

The import routines are constantly evolving, including an element of self learn as new formats are encountered. I will detail more of the background systems in a later post, these are a unique key part of http://www.sailracer.co.uk/

In the beginning

This Blog is about my website http://www.sailracer.co.uk/

History

The site in its latest incarnation sprung onto the web in Spring 2007, some will be familiar with the SailRacer name from the magazine of the same title. This was launched and run by my sister Carole Lovesey and partner Rob Andrews a few years ago, as a printed publication lasting a couple of years before they started a family and Rob went to work for the Royal Yachting Association.

I have been the Secretary for the UK Mirror Class Association for a number of years and had developed a web system for managing race results, so when looking for a domain to offer this to a wider audience SailRacer was a natural choice, fortunately Carole and Rob were cooperative.

Managing the results

One of the challenges of running active class association like Mirrors is handling a large volume of results. There are well over a 100 Mirror events each month, these days people expect to see these results published quickly on the web, often on the day of racing.

Adding these to the web was becoming virtually a full time job, so I decided to apply some of my professional skills of developing web sites to come up with a web based solution. This involved designing a database that could store the results, the clever bit being the ability to upload results in different formats from a variety of sources. The system cleverly sorted and formatted the data before importing into the database.

The results could then be viewed on the Mirror website (http://www.ukmirrorsailing.com/) and being in a database easily searched. This delivered added benefits like being able to report on individual sailor performances, great when it was time to select for squads and Teams.

It was clear that over sailing classes would find this type of facility useful, so http://www.sailracer.co.uk/ came to live in 2007