Instructional Summaries

Introduction

The Instructional summaries are a "pet" project of Aaron's. Its a summary of the red covered instructional handbook aligned to the dates of each program. The PDF version can be printed out on a single duplexed page, providing site clinicians a useful, one page summary of the entire season.

But with the vagaries of scheduling such items there are many challenges with getting this to work consistently.

• Aligning different "Event Types" (Event.Name field) to each specific day of the schedule.
  • Problem - Days that are skipped because of holidays, spring breaks, local events etc...
    • For a long time "off" events were not entered in the schedule, so no way to

Allowed entries for scheduling are checked against the following prefixes: Practice, Games, Intersite... and the first four letters are converted to upper case to use as a type "key". Thus becoming "PRAC", "GAME", "INTE"....

In Spring 2012, a hack was added to programmatically remap the Rainier entries (mentioned below) introduced (Photo Day, Bring a Friend Day) by prepending "Practice - " to the strings..

There are currently 3 passes at the instructional summary:

• The original one - I think this is an HTML version that is not really used anymore, but still provided
• The 2 page PDF version - By printing duplex allows the site clinician to have a single sheet of paper with the seasons instructions on them.
• The mobile db version - This one has a db based setup to do the matchups and I think is better than the previous algorithms, pretty sure it's depositing HTML snippets into the mobile db

Engage

This specific task has become simpler with Engage output as of 2016(?). Engage provides an additional field for event information and have pull down selection for type, so it's no longer a free form field. This is a huge step forward for several of the processes.

Workflow

From workflow, the Event Names imported into Rainier are consistent with what scheduling expects.

But, once in Rainier, they can be changed to anything, breaking any chance of consistency for the scheduling input. The best example of this is Spring 2012 when "Off" events were imported into Rainier. Official "Photo Day" and "Bring a Friend Day" events were used to replace existing "Practice" (and possibly some "Games") entries.

Adding Off events provides some chance at more solidly reconciling each day of the Instructional manual to a given event for a program. But since its not consistently used, it cannot be relied on and the matching algorithm doesn't easily lend itself to flexibility.

One possible system for helping ease that is to provide additional options for setting the type of those events in workflow. Will investigate that.

Rainier

Another method would be to make sure that any changes in Rainier to Event Name are just appended to the existing types (outlined above).

So entries such as:

Practice - Photo Day
Practice - Bring a Friend Day
Games - Photo Day
Off - Memorial Day

Would all work with the existing system.