Shoot'n'Score It --> Practiscore Conversion Utility

[jcwren]

In the on-going quest to make things easier, I've written a web-based conversion utility that will take an EzWinScore zip file downloaded from Shoot'n'Score It and convert it to a Practiscore .psc file. By emailing this .psc file to yourself, using Dropbox, or otherwise getting it over to an iPad or Android device, you can load a match directly into Practiscore. (A .psc file is what Practiscore uses to move data around).

The utility is available at http://tinymicros.com/ssi2ps.

If stages are defined in SSI, they will be transferred along with the shooters.

Shoot'n'Score It has a number of... "undocumented and unexpected features". To put it politely...

1. Phone numbers are mangled. Like ssi2ezws, ssi2ps just deletes the phone number field.
   
2. Cases of names are fixed. "ima d. shooter" becomes "Ima D. Shooter".
   
3. SSI mangles the stage names with HTML entities ("Quick & Fast" becomes "Quick & Fast", for example). These are repaired.
   
4. ssi2ps removes all non-approved shooters, so declined (D), pending (P) and deleted (X) shooters are not cluttering the shooter list. (This does mean you can't upload scores back to SSI. No one cares.)
   
5. Production power factor is forced to minor (SSI doesn't minor-ize the power factor switching from Limited major to Production division)
   
6. SSI has no concept of multi-string stages, so ALL stages are exported as single string stages. If you have a multiple string stage (INCLUDING CLASSIFIERS!), you will need to adjust the string count on the Practiscore device.
   
7. There's also no way to specify the number of hits per target, so ssi2ps infers this by taking the total stage points, dividing by 5, subtracting the number of steel, then dividing by the number of targets.
   
8. SSI does not let you specify the type of target, nor does Practiscore know about IPSC vs metric. There's no way to eliminate the B zone scoring column in Practiscore.
   

SSI doesn't correctly generate one of the files that tells EzWinScore a stage is a classifier (Stages_Extra_P.txt, column 3, in case you wanted to know ). However, SSI *does* always put the 'CM yy-nn' at the front of the stage name, and ssi2ps infers it's a classifier from this, and sets the flag to tell Practiscore that it's a classifier (which it doesn't really do anything with...)

Currently, ssi2ps is at version 1.0.0.0.0.a. I can successfully convert the 2012 GA State match that has 258 entries with 237 active shooters, and the only thing I have to do is change one stage from 1 string to 2.

If you discover any issues with this, please don't hesitate to contact me. My email address is on the ssi2ps web page.

[jcwren]

Can someone delete this and the parent post? I put them in the wrong section.

[jenlu]

Hi, great work :-)

Drop me a PM or email (jens@twostorysoftware.com) on how we can make SSI work better and a list of things to fix !

Have you had a chance to look at our new API, this could also be used for these things.

/ Jens

[jenlu]

Hi,

we just deployed corrections to some/all of the above:

* Upper case / lower case - we keep it just as it is within SSI, e.g. if someone has a name of 'joe smith' then that

is what is export (would not recommend to change this)

* html escaping is turned off - so no more like "Quick & Fast", this will be exported as "Quick & Fast"

* corrected the classifier row 3, had no idea what row 3 was but now it should be correct so the Stages_Extra_P.txt

should be ok now

Could you explain about the "...Production power factor is forced to minor (SSI doesn't minor-ize the power factor switching from Limited major to Production division)..." - what would you like us to do here?

Great if you could test the corrections that we have made !

/ Jens

[jenlu]

Hi, on topic;

> 5. Production power factor is forced to minor (SSI doesn't

> minor-ize the power factor switching from Limited

> major to Production division)

Within SSI you can not register for Production with Major, only Minor. For Limited you

can register for Major or Minor. The competitors.tsv file then has major or minor as applicable.

Do let us know if this is not correct!

/ Jens

[wgnoyes]

If you change an existing registered competitor from a major power factor division to "production", his power factor should be forced to minor regardless of its current setting.

[jenlu]

Ok, understood.

Whenever you edit a competitor within SSI this is checked so it is not possible to edit a competitor to have Production and Major. (when you edit and attempt to save you will get a warning and info on that you need to correct this).

So the competitor info in SSI will always have a valid division and pf, hence whatever is exported from SSI to EWS files will also have a valid division and PF.

In light of this I do not think the statement on SSI not forcing minor for Production is correct, but will chase

down the problem if if can be shown (just re-tested all this);

>... (SSI doesn't minor-ize the power factor switching

> from Limited major to Production division)...

/ Jens

Edited March 11, 2013 by jenlu

[jcwren]

Jens,

Perhaps it's since been fixed since this occurred, but it was most definitely writing files with production having major power factor. EZWS would auto-minorize (new word!) it, but earlier versions of Practiscore would accept it.

Name-casing actually *is* important. Since the names go back into EZWS, it pollutes the database with mixed case names, it will also break sorting by name on some programs. I don't know what back-end you're using, but I'm using the Perl Lingua::EN::NameCase 'NameCase' module. This fixes mcburnett to McBurnett, etc. I also have a special case for names with no vowels, so 'jc wren' gets changed to 'JC Wren' correctly.

Good work on the rest of the fixes. I do have a few suggestions on the UI that I'll email you separately.

Thanks for the updates

--jc

[jenlu]

Ok, will talk on the UI ideas separately over email. As reference SSI is a Django/Python/Postgress/twitter-bootstrap site with lots of pypi stuff as needed ;-)

/ Jens