Team schedules using a FindREPl hack
Posted: 06 Apr 2018 00:38
Paraphrasing Bogart's character in Casablanca: "Of all the gin joints, I walks into …”.
I have participated in two pool and one dart leagues during my membership at a local fraternal organization. Distribution of the team schedules has been established for decades, but require similar eyeball interpretation. The most annoying differences are in listing matches with the home team first or on the right on a very crowded piece of paper that lists all teams.
I wrote applications to interpret a one page PDF or web page and list a line or two for each date for only one team, showing HOME and AWAY games with opponent locations. I printed a copy for each opponent as we met them and it seemed well received, but I was now in the publishing business! Our administration also liked these schedules for kitchen meal planning.
The pool leagues involved about a dozen teams but darts is much bigger. The input was a large PDF with about a hundred teams in multiple divisions. The Minute Man - World's largest Steel-Tip Dart League has an open website at http://www.mmdl.org/ for the PDF: MMDL_S18_SS_Sched (It was too large to attach.)
Enough background information, The method involved defining arrays for dates and team info such as name, location, address and an events file as the engine for look-ups. I elected to use FindREPL.bat to store all of the tables required to build the arrays in one sequential file using tags much like FindREPL accesses its own HELP. So in the last phase to print, I need batch script code, the file of tables and FindREPL itself and I remain in the publishing business and cannot penetrate divisions beyond my own.
I spent some time reading what I could understand of the code and found a 'minimally intrusive' change to hook into the code for my own purposes. I stole the HELP with zero arguments from FindREPL ! After some experimentation, I set the following objectives:
1. The application consists entirely of one batch script which contains within it all required data.
2. This script is a fully functional fork of FindREPL20.bat only intended to be used to call itself.
3. All user options are specified by dialogs with the user with no arguments required for printing schedules.
4. There are to be no prerequisite external routines in CD or PATH beyond normal Windows 7 or 10 system functions.
I am satisfied with the result. MMDls.bat stands alone and requires as few as four keystrokes to generate a list. It is double-clickable and can run where-ever it is downloaded. I have attached a zip file that also contains the generating code to demonstrate the technique for the curious. The script generator still needs to be run by me at the start of each new session/season.
Antonio, I started this thread so as not to clutter your main topic. Your product has been robust and stable for years. I hope that PM was not the most appropriate. I understood that you were amenable to the use of your code for non-commercial purposes, as long as attribution to you remains intact as coded. So, do I have permission to distribute this hack of your code?
Further, I do not want support to be undefined. The average user shouldn't even know about you without the /? HELP, but perhaps I should insert a few leading lines pointing to myself and let the rest of the help guide to getting the real product from DOStips. John A.
I have participated in two pool and one dart leagues during my membership at a local fraternal organization. Distribution of the team schedules has been established for decades, but require similar eyeball interpretation. The most annoying differences are in listing matches with the home team first or on the right on a very crowded piece of paper that lists all teams.
I wrote applications to interpret a one page PDF or web page and list a line or two for each date for only one team, showing HOME and AWAY games with opponent locations. I printed a copy for each opponent as we met them and it seemed well received, but I was now in the publishing business! Our administration also liked these schedules for kitchen meal planning.
The pool leagues involved about a dozen teams but darts is much bigger. The input was a large PDF with about a hundred teams in multiple divisions. The Minute Man - World's largest Steel-Tip Dart League has an open website at http://www.mmdl.org/ for the PDF: MMDL_S18_SS_Sched (It was too large to attach.)
Enough background information, The method involved defining arrays for dates and team info such as name, location, address and an events file as the engine for look-ups. I elected to use FindREPL.bat to store all of the tables required to build the arrays in one sequential file using tags much like FindREPL accesses its own HELP. So in the last phase to print, I need batch script code, the file of tables and FindREPL itself and I remain in the publishing business and cannot penetrate divisions beyond my own.
I spent some time reading what I could understand of the code and found a 'minimally intrusive' change to hook into the code for my own purposes. I stole the HELP with zero arguments from FindREPL ! After some experimentation, I set the following objectives:
1. The application consists entirely of one batch script which contains within it all required data.
2. This script is a fully functional fork of FindREPL20.bat only intended to be used to call itself.
3. All user options are specified by dialogs with the user with no arguments required for printing schedules.
4. There are to be no prerequisite external routines in CD or PATH beyond normal Windows 7 or 10 system functions.
I am satisfied with the result. MMDls.bat stands alone and requires as few as four keystrokes to generate a list. It is double-clickable and can run where-ever it is downloaded. I have attached a zip file that also contains the generating code to demonstrate the technique for the curious. The script generator still needs to be run by me at the start of each new session/season.
Antonio, I started this thread so as not to clutter your main topic. Your product has been robust and stable for years. I hope that PM was not the most appropriate. I understood that you were amenable to the use of your code for non-commercial purposes, as long as attribution to you remains intact as coded. So, do I have permission to distribute this hack of your code?
Further, I do not want support to be undefined. The average user shouldn't even know about you without the /? HELP, but perhaps I should insert a few leading lines pointing to myself and let the rest of the help guide to getting the real product from DOStips. John A.
