RaceBase


Chapter 5: Registering Racers

The Basic Scheme

We'll start by repeating information from Chapter 2: For the list of racers, RaceBase uses the standard Palm Address Book application. Fortunately, in addition to the "usual" information (name, address, phone number, email, etc.), Palm provided four "custom" fields in the Address Book which can be used for any purpose. The current version of RaceBase uses those custom fields to hold the specialized racer information - bib#, category, sex and age (which to save space are combined into a single field, e.g., "M44"), and individual handicaps (if any).

Renaming the Custom Fields

Although it isn't necessary, it may facilitate your efforts at data entry if you rename the custom fields. This will make it that much clearer to the person doing the data entry what information goes where, and lessen the liklihood of mistakes. Both on the Palm desktop software and in the handheld unit, you'll find a menu item in the Address Book application called Rename Custom Fields. Rename "Custom 1" as "Bib #". For regular road race usage, rename "Custom 2" as "Age Group" or "Category" if you prefer; for cross-country usage, rename "Custom 2" as "Team". Rename "Custom 3" as "SexAge" (for cross-country usage, you can ignore this if you prefer), and rename "Custom 4" as "H.C." (or something similar).

Entering Registrants into the Database

Most of your registration will be done using the Palm desktop application (or other database; see below). When you open the application, and select the Address Book module, you add someone to the database by pressing the New button:

For pre-registration, you can fill in as much of this information as you like. The only absolutely essential fields, the ones which are used by RaceBase for scoring, are the Bib#, the Age Group, and the Sex/Age (the latter for road races only). Obviously, you'll really want the last name and first name as well. For the printout and display of results, RaceBase will also use the City and State information. One of the companion applications, Race Announcer, will also use the Country (if it's filled in; only do so if it's "another" country), and the Note field, where you can store special announcer's notes about the racer ("Last year's winner", "President of the company sponsoring the race", etc.). RaceBase itself, however, pays no attention to the Note field (or to the Country).

It will obviously be simpler if you are able to assign and enter Bib#'s at the same time as the registrant is entered into the database. If you can't, you'll need to go through the database later and edit (update) the entries one at a time, adding the Bib #'s, which will be a slower process.

Note that when you're done with data entry for this person, you can press either the OK button (lower right in this, Macintosh, example) or the New button (left of center). If you have a series of names to enter, use the New button; this will save you extra steps and time for each one.

For race day entry, you'll almost certainly want to limit yourself just to name (first and last, maybe even last if you're really pressed for time), bib#, age group, and sex/age.You can fill in the remainder of the information later.

For smaller races, or if you have limited race day entries, you can of course enter this information directly on the handheld unit (the PalmPilot or Palm III). Your experience will vary depending on the skill of the person performing data entry, but our experience is that a person reasonably well acquainted with Graffiti can enter 2 racers per minute into the PalmPilot. The time available to do so will be from the time race day registration begins, up to the time that the first racer finishes the race (which obviously depends on the length of the race). If that time isn't enough to add the entries to the PalmPilot, then the entries will need to be entered into a laptop or desktop computer onsite and downloaded into the PalmPilot. Note that you can make entries in BOTH locations, because of the HotSync capability of the PalmPilot, which means that with one laptop and one handheld unit you'll have an estimated 5 racer per minute data entry capability on race morning.

Shortcuts for Race Day Registration

You can maximize throughput for race day data entry by knowing these three facts: First, category comparison is case-insensitive (lower-case and upper-case letters are treated identically). So you don't need to worry if you get that wrong. Second, and more importantly, when RaceBase matches the category entered for a particular racer against the list of categories, it will consider that a match has occured if the racer's category starts with the same letters and numbers as that of one of your categories. What does this mean? It means that if you have a category "M40-49", when you enter information for an individual racer on race day, you only need to enter "M4" (or "m4"). What if you have two categories, "M40-44" and "M45-49"? In this case, "M4" would match the first one that it finds in the list of categories (presumably "M40-44" if they are in order). For racers in the "M45-49" category, you'll have to enter (at a minimum) "M45", but you can still enter "M4" for those in the "M40-44" category. Of course, if you find any of this confusing, you can always enter the entire category name, but obviously that is more time-consuming, and on race day, time counts.

The third shortcut is that, under some cases, you can omit the "SexAge" field entirely, leaving only the Bib# and Age Group/Category as essential fields. The "SexAge" field is used for two purposes - to sort (and score) racers by sex, and to print out their age on the output for informative purposes only. If you don't enter the SexAge field, RaceBase will look at the AgeGroup/Category field for that information. If, as is true in almost all cases, the Age Group/Category field starts with M or F (for Male and Female, as in "M40-49" or "F30-35"), that letter is used to establish the sex of the racer. If the Age Group/Category field contains a number (as in the same examples), RaceBase will use that number (the first of the two) to create an "approximate age" for the racer. This means, for example, that if you don't enter a "SexAge" for a racer, and the Category is "M40-49" (which itself could have been abbreviated "M4" as described in the previous paragraph), then the racer will be listed as a 40-year-old male on the printout.

Note that if the Age Group/Category does NOT conform to these restrictions (for example, the category is "Wetsuit" or "Clydesdale" or "Relay" or something else), then the sex and age of the racer will be indeterminate, so for racers in those categories only you'll definitely want to enter the "SexAge" information. But for the vast majority of racers it won't be necessary, so if time is of the essence, you can eliminate it.

Using PalmPilot Shortcuts for Data Entry

One feature of the PalmPilot that many users aren't familiar with is the built-in "shortcuts." This feature lets you define certain character strings which are "expanded" automatically. For example, if you enter the "shortcut" key followed by the letters "scs", it might immediately become "Stevens Creek Software." The best use for this feature for race registration would probably be for entering cities (or perhaps categories, especially for cross-country races where "categories" are really "team names"). For example, let's say that in your race, 50% of the race day registrants will come from three cities - San Jose, Los Gatos, and Cupertino. Rather than repeatedly entering those names, you could create a shortcut "j" for San Jose, "g" for Los Gatos, and "c" for Cupertino. Now to enter the city, you first enter the "shortcut" character (which is basically a script lower-case "l"), and then either "j", "g", or "c". Obviously this is a LOT shorter (and quicker) to do. For more details on creating and using PalmPilot shortcuts, please consult your PalmPilot manual.

Using Another Database for Registration

Ultimately, the names of your race registrants do have to end up in the PalmPilot Address Book on your handheld unit that is used for timing and scoring. But it isn't actually necessary to enter them originally that way, either into the handheld unit or even into the desktop version of the PalmPilot Address Book. The PalmPilot Address Book can import tab-delimited or comma-separated values which have been saved (exported) by virtually any other database or PIM (Personal Information Manager) you may be using to do race registration. If you do this, you can save time by limiting the amount of information transferred. Even if your "real" registration database has street addresses, phone numbers, etc., when you export data from that database into a tab-delimited or comma-separated text file, limit the export to the key information - first name, last name, city (and state if different from the "norm"), bib#, age group, and sex/age. The export step will go more quickly, importing the data into the PalmPilot Address Book on the desktop will go more quickly, and downloading the data to the handheld unit (HotSync'ing) will go more quickly as well.

If you do go this route, it goes without saying that you must test out the export/import/download cycle before race day to make sure you know what you're doing!

Using Your Address Book for Multiple Races

Many people run series of races, and the same people show up week after week. RaceBase includes a feature to help you take advantage of this. You don't want to delete the people from your database every week and then re-enter them, but the chances are that they won't have the same Bib# each week, and more importantly, you don't want someone with last week's Bib# still in your database to be erroneously scored in the next race.

RaceBase provides you with the tool to deal with this in its Import menu:

When you select Set Bib#'s to 0, RaceBase will go through your Address Book, find all entries whose Custom 1 field (possibly renamed "Bib#"; it doesn't matter) is a number greater than zero, and sets that entry to zero. For technical reasons involving the speed of the operation as well as limiting the size of the RaceBase software, RaceBase will not actually eliminate the number entirely, but will instead substitute a "0" for each digit in the number. Thus someone who was number "123" will now show up as number "000". Now for the next race, you can simply go through and enter the new Bib#.

One thing you cannot do with RaceBase as it is currently configured it to register people for more than one race at once. If you had to do this, you could make multiple copies of the entry in your Address Book, and assign different categories (that's Palm categories, not RaceBase categories) to each one, like "RaceReg1" and "RaceReg2". Then you'll be able to easily access race #1 by just displaying the entries in category "RaceReg1", and set those Bib #'s.

Using Your Address Book for Race Registration as well as for Personal Use

The "key" for RaceBase is that the bib# field must contain a number. As a result, you can actually use your Palm Address Book to contain information about not only the racers but also your friends, relatives, and business contacts. You can even use the "Custom 1" field to contain information about those people, if you need to, just as long as that information isn't a number. When RaceBase looks through the Address Book to find the information about your racers, it will simply ignore any entry whose Bib# (Custom field #1) is not a number.

When the race is over, you'll probably want to remove the race registration people from your database. RaceBase provides you with the tool to do this in its Import menu:

When you select Purge Racers, RaceBase will go through your Address Book, find all entries whose Custom 1 field (possibly renamed "Bib#"; it doesn't matter) is a number greater than zero, and deletes them from the database (they'll be deleted from the desktop the next time you HotSync, as with any other changes you make to your Palm Address Book).

You can actually accomplish the same thing on your desktop in a different way if you were careful when you entered the racers in your Address Book. Before you enter any racers in the database, create a new "Category" in your Address Book called "RaceReg" (or something similar) and make sure you select that category before you start entering batches of racers (when you enter racers in batches, the category that is selected before you start adding them will be automatically applied to new entries). Now when you're done with those people, you can display the RaceReg category in your desktop Address Book, select all of them with the mouse, and then use the Cut button to delete them all at one time.

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