En Guarde's File Format?

[lanyingjie]

Hello there,

I'm not sure whether this goes here or in the armory section, so please forgive me and help me out, mods.

Essentially, we've been trying to do up something to let fencers in Singapore register for competitions and submit their details online. The system is more or less up and undergoing testing now, hopefully it'll clean things up and reduce admin issues for the national association.

The next upgrade though, we're looking at finding a way to export files and interface with fencing tournament software. So once I have the confirmed registrations for an event, what I'd like to do is to generate a file readable by the software that will load the necessary details instead of having to re-key in everything.

And ideally, if we could have the tournament's full data exported, I'd like to generate data and statistics for individual fencers. The system is written in PHP and I'm envisioning a recalculation of ranking points immediately once I upload the latest results.

Any suggestions on where I may investigate this data issue? I've seen that askFRED links to the Fencing Time people, but I think the local competitions use En Guarde.

Thanks a lot!

[noodle]

Any suggestions on where I may investigate this data issue?

why don't you open up a file in a text editor and see what it looks like? if its a proprietary file format, talk to the company that produces engarde, perhaps they would be willing to help you with it.

[lanyingjie]

Hmmm I'm wondering if Fencing Time might be a good option? En Guarde's made by a French company and I'm afraid of the language barrier! Technical development work is tough enough without langauge issues haha.

Anyone from Fencing Time/askFRED here able to help me out?

[noodle]

Hmmm I'm wondering if Fencing Time might be a good option? En Guarde's made by a French company and I'm afraid of the language barrier! Technical development work is tough enough without langauge issues haha.

Anyone from Fencing Time/askFRED here able to help me out?

dan (from fencing time) and peet (from askfred) both frequent the boards. but i can tell you from experience that the standard fencing time and askfred files are both easy to work with.

i can also tell you that it is very likely that askfred and fencingtime could be modified for use in another country if asked. its already used in some places in canada, as far as i know.

[lanyingjie]

Hmm the local fencing scene is a lot smaller scale actually, and we've already developed our own in-house system that fits the local requirements a lot tighter (the schools scene takes up quite a big element here and almost all the tournaments are run by the national association on the official circuit because of venue and equipment constraints).

What's dan's username? I'd like to PM him about it then!

THANKS A BUNCH!

[noodle]

Hmm the local fencing scene is a lot smaller scale actually, and we've already developed our own in-house system that fits the local requirements a lot tighter (the schools scene takes up quite a big element here and almost all the tournaments are run by the national association on the official circuit because of venue and equipment constraints).

What's dan's username? I'd like to PM him about it then!

THANKS A BUNCH!

http://www.fencing.net/forums/members/1814.html

[jjefferies]

Hmmm I'm wondering if Fencing Time might be a good option? En Guarde's made by a French company and I'm afraid of the language barrier! Technical development work is tough enough without langauge issues haha.

Anyone from Fencing Time/askFRED here able to help me out?

You can send to peet@askfred.net. I would hazard to guess that Peet and Dan are both in Dallas at the moment at the USFA NAC C. So they might not be able to respond immediately. My understanding from overheard snippets of conversations in the past is that when trying to support non-US events there are differences in ranking/classification for seeding and then if there is money involved there's currency exchange issues. But best you ask them directly as things could have easily changed.

[oiuyt]

Peet's here (Dallas), Dan's not. Or if he is, he's been (successfully) hiding from me for three days.

The Prise de Fer people, especially Wayne Jenness, would be good people to talk to about En Guarde and English-language localization as they have a lot of experience with it. I believe Wayne no longer reads FdN but I suspect a message via FdN member epeemike81 will end up going to the right people.

-B

[dberke]

This is Dan, the Fencing Time guy... (and Brad is correct, I'm not in Dallas.)

It is my opinion, that with the combination of AskFRED and Fencing Time, there is little reason for anyone to develop their own system. AskFRED does pretty much everything you could ask for in terms of event registration, payment collection, results tracking, etc. and Fencing Time is capable of running events of any size and complexity (with a few minor exceptions.)

It is true that both systems are primarily USA-centric, but that does not prevent you from using them in other countries. Fencing Time is being used in hundreds of clubs around the USA, and is also being used to run tournaments in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the U.A.E. I believe I've even had someone in Singapore buy a copy, so someone you know may already be using it!

I'm currently working on the next version of Fencing Time which will be fully customizable to any specific fencing federation's rules. That way, you won't have to ignore the USA-specific stuff, and instead can have customizations for your country.

Peet and I have been independently working on AskFRED and Fencing Time, respectively, for nearly ten years. That's a lot of experience and lessons learned about how to build and run software systems for fencing tournaments. On the surface, it seems like it may be simple to write software to do that - but once you get into it, you'll learn it's far more involved than you would think (especially if you are trying to be flexible.)

Considering how cheaply you can buy the products encompassing all of that experience (free for AskFRED, $99 USD for Fencing Time), it seems silly to build your own system from scratch as anything other than as a "for fun" project.

Sorry if this sounds like too much of a commercial for AskFRED and Fencing Time... I think there are many people (who aren't Peet or I) who would say the same thing!

Dan

[lanyingjie]

Okay I think the main problem is that our systems are already aligned in this manner, so migration is going to be a giant PITA. Thanks a lot for the help guys, looks like it's back to the drawing board.