Lots of hockey competitions share tops. I played in an inline tournament in Nelson where the womens redbacks team had to literally pull the tops off the smelly guys as they came off the rink. With no groom in inline hockey, they had to be quick too, as it was cutting into their warmup.

Also, we don’t do it here, but lots of hockey clubs have the same tops through all age grades/genders etc. So they might have 6 teams all wearing their club tops, and the teams are differentiated by ages/grades. If you’re planning to create something which others places could use, having tops as a table makes sense to me.
It’s the team name which differentiates the teams on paper, and the tops that differentiates them on the ice.

Also, Beasts A and Beasts B could be very similar teams, so being able to create a copy of the team, and then edit it to put in the differences would make sense to me.

Also, you could pull up last years team, and make them this years team, and then pull out and add players who have changed. That would save work on my part, I know. I use filemaker a fair bit, and it has ‘duplicate record’ which I use a lot when half the information in the next record is the same as the record I just did.

My suggestion would also allow you to have a team named one thing, using entirely different tops, but still know what tops they’re using. Phantoms last year played in dark blue Aces tops.

You have to remember that we have to manage tops as well (particularly ensuring that two sets of similar colour don’t end up in the same grade/competition. The only way for the database to know that there are two sets of dark blue tops (Beasts and Aces) and two sets of green tops (Bullfrogs and Stars) is to enter them as the tops, not the colours. Otherwise the database would only list ‘green’ and we’d miss out on the ability to put two sets of the same colour, one in each grade.

In your example, I would see it like this. Create two teams rather than one “Beasts (DIHL ” and “Beasts (SIHL)”, Keep in mind this “program” could help out other rinks around New Zealand that don’t use the same “grouping” method we use in Dunedin because we have tops with those team names.[/quote:govyt3o2]

I guess my concern is (getting into database theory) is that if you create two different teams, you’re recreating information and storing it twice. If you have a table of teams, or maybe even call it ‘tops’ (Beasts, Sharks, SK8 etc etc), and then another table for each instance that team occurs you’re avoiding doing that.

If you think about a database in which the Beasts might appear in SIHL, DIHL (twice), Easton Cup, Erewhon Cup, and then maybe be used by other people (midgets or peewees for their leagues), you might be re-creating that information about the Beasts ‘tops’ six or seven times.

You might be able to help the team management out if you can ‘recreate existing team with new instance’ button, and then modify the roster. Say for the beasts, where the DIHL teams and SIHL teams are similar but not exactly the same, it’d be good to have a button to make a new Beasts instance, copy all the existing info across, and then modify it to make the differences. It’d also be useful to recreate last years beasts team to make this years instance of the beasts team as well, rather then re-entering the info.

I can’t think of another area of finances that the club collects that you’d want to track in this system. Possibly registrations, but the registration amount is fixed, so I’d just have a tick box. I can’t think of a reason we’d want to track registrations in previous years, I’d say that it should be a tick box which gets blanked by a button by the admin at the beginning of the year.

The other money we collect relates to practises and outside tournaments, and I can’t think there’d be anything useful in putting it in this system.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

A player can be in any number of teams. Players are placed into teams before the tournament by organizers or by choice (However things are run for that tournament), so there is no limit as to how many times a player is entered.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

My point is, there’s things that don’t change about teams – name, top color etc. There are other things about teams that do change – the players in them, manager, coach etc.

Take the Beasts for example. The DIHL beasts are going to have a slightly different team lineup than the SIHL Beasts. I would have done it by a ‘team’ table which indicated all the different teams that we can have. And then made a team_instance table, which links to the team table. Players, coaches etc, link to team_instance_id. So if you’re playing in both Beasts teams, you’d be in both instances. Ryan, who is playing Bears in the DIHL, only links to one.

If you put it in one table with multiple beasts instances then you’re both recreating data, and also you’d have no way to list all players who played for the Beasts this year, as they’d be in Beasts 1 and Beasts 2.

Also, it’d be really nice if we could link the cell phone numbers to a web sms sending service. Clicking a button and sending everyone a txt message would be brilliant. There used to be a free one of these in south africa but it closed down, but I’m sure they still exist.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

I had a discussion with Ryan about the competition thing, the reason why I have the option to add teams directly to a competition is because not all competitions will have more than one devision, in the case that a competition only had one devision the organizer entering the competition would be required to specify a devision for a tournament with no divisions?

Instead it has the option to have a devision less competition or one with devisions.

If a competition has more than one devision it will ignore the “completions_teams” table completely and look in “divisions_teams” hence the double up there.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

OK, if that’s going to work ” title=”Smiley” />

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

• period1_start
• period2_start
• period3_start

These are for another underlining possiblilty of the program, To speed things along for the scorers I’m looking at making a scoring program that will work with the database to make there lives easier. The period starts would allow a detailed time line of how the game went for players to view after the game.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Interested to see how it works, but remember that people need to run this and watch a game of hockey at the same time, so you might want to make it a removable feature.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

I see what you mean, but people would not have to enter it manually, I was thinking here it would just be added by the type of penalty any way. So I suppose there isn’t a need for time but instead a new table for penalties and there times.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Yeah my point is that it doesn’t need to be stored.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

Also the time thing is another fancy thing that would be included in the scoring system, when they clicked for a shot at the net it would record the time as well with no extra effort for a detailed time line of the game ” title=”Cheesy” />[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Again, I’m not sure our scorers would want to do that, so you might want to make it an optional feature.

We could also put in the feature where they list who was on the ice when goals were scored, and figure out plus/minus for players, but there’s no way they’re going to cope with that. They’re often on their own in the box there, running scoring, timekeeping, and penalty timekeeping.

They sometimes use a computer in there to connect to the scoreboard. It’d be nice if you could interface your system with the software that runs that, but that might be a pipe dream.