Does anyone know what the function of WINTD under the Master Tab which says - “Update from USCF Web Site” does? Does it work?
That must be a recent addition, it doesn’t seem to appear in the version of WinTD I have (from last summer.)
I know Tom Doan was asking how to use the thin client interface to the member database to get real-time updates on players (especially their membership status), perhaps that’s it?
I’m not sure if Tom will be down for the State Tournament this weekend or not, if so, I’ll ask him. Or maybe I’ll just go to Estima and ask the question.
thanks.
It updates the expiration date (and state) using the thin client information. It takes about 2-3 seconds per player because it has to do a separate request for each ID. There’s also an operation on the Players menu which will apply to players once they’re pulled into the tournament file. (That’s probably the one you’re more likely to be using).
Now that USCF gets the expiration dates updated in (almost??) real time, it allows you to prune the hit list on the day of the tournament using USCF’s records.
It pays to come look here. That will help me with the event I have on Saturday with 350+ players.
Thanks Tom, I really appreciate it - this will help a great deal preparing for next weekend. I know I will be processing a bunch of registrations and I’m sure a bunch of kids will be renewing - so not having to manually update that information in the Master file and Tournament files will be a great time saver. We are thinking 800+ players
I refer to MSA as ‘near-real time’ data.
Most of the time the MSA database is updated within seconds of when a member’s record is updated on the USCF’s internal database. However, if there is a network problem around that time, the update might not complete, so once a day (at around 6AM) we do a bulk update from member records of all records changed in the last few days. This also allows us to pick up data that isn’t kept in in the member record, so updating that data doesn’t trigger an update of the member record, such as ratings changes. (If we updated the member record and hence MSA for each update in a member’s rating, such as during a rerate cycle, we’d be doing many more updates than we do now, and that might put too big a load on our network connection.)
We also do an update of the MSA database a few hours after creating a new rating list for everyone on the new ratings list, so that MSA has the new official ratings.
The ‘thin client’ interface was actually written before we started updating MSA in near-real time, and it does a query into the USCF’s internal database, so it is a true real time application.
Tom, what published rating do you pull from the thin client interface?
Depending on the tournament, someone might be using February ratings for a tournament that begins on Saturday or March ratings. (And the USATE, held two weeks ago, used the December list, as I recall.)
Does WinTD know which ratings list an event is using?
If not, it might update the WinTD database with a rating other than the one the TD wants to be using.
Unless I am reading Tom’s earlier response incorrectly, they are only updating expiration dt and state with the thin client.
Tried it - it didn’t work for me
Me either
In that case, it might be really cool to have a feature which would update (and take the 2-3 seconds for) only players who appear to be expired.
(Or am I asking for a feature which is already there?)
Bill Smythe
Yes, that sounds like what Tom was aiming for, though updating ratings may also be a desirable feature, though possibly a little tricker because of the supplement date issue.
We have two reports suggesting it may not be working for everyone.
I’ll have to get updated copies of WinTD (PC and Mac) from Tom and see if I can track what it’s doing.
At this point, it doesn’t pull ratings. I have code in there that works for that, including fishing up ratings as of a particular date in the past, but I was a bit concerned about how easy it would be for someone to muck up the ratings from the supplement that was supposed to be used. (It would also be (too) easy to change some ratings and not others). As a first go, I restricted this to just the information that would be unambiguously more correct on the web site than on the supplement.
You can apply it only to a selected set of players, so you can either
(a) filter on just the “non-members” (no ID or expired ID), and select the listed players who have an ID.
(b) sort on the expiration date and select only the ones have expired memberships.
I don’t know if USCF is running on a faster server than a few months ago, but it now seems to be running at about 1 sec per player.
We moved to a new web server in early December, Tom.
I’m not sure how much faster that would make the thin client interface run, because it still has to pull data from the USCF’s internal database server in TN, and as far as I know there has been no significant change in the network response time between TN and NE (where the ISP is.)
The operation on the master file was in 4.03. It was added to the player menu with 4.10.