gstelmack
05-05-2007, 08:02 PM
I finally got a look at one of the MP draft utilities that is out there (3ric's for the HFL), and my first thought was shock at how much work a commish has to go through to get data into it when a draft rolls around. My second thought was that I could greatly reduce that workload with just a little bit of effort.
The first result of that took less than 24 hours and was the "Draft Order" table that Interrogator spits out. This is just two columns without headers: Pick # and Team ID. The last row is 225/33 to indicate end of the table (as required by HFL). I believe this is straightforward enough that any league can use it without much work on their end if they are not already expecting that, and it should greatly reduce a bunch of hand-editing and searching/replacing in Excel.
However, there are three other areas I'd like to standardize:
First, the draft pool. What columns does everyone want? First name, last name, position, and college seem obvious. Bureau used to be provided, but was dropped from the player report window in 2k7 and thus is not dumped by Extractor (unless this snuck back in to 6.0e, but I have not looked yet). What other columns do people want? If it is just those listed, I can add this table to Interrogator as well, and you've got a very quick extract to get the data needed for the draft utility. Do you want combine numbers as well? Height, weight, anything else? I can either have Interrogator dump a standard table, or add a checkbox to Extractor that will dump a customized table ready for importing. But I'd like to standardize exactly what columns everyone wants (and at the least in such a way that a specific league can ignore columns they aren't interested in).
Second, I would really like to add a feature to Draft Analyzer that lets people upload draft lists to these utilities directly. Something like "send the next 60 undrafted picks to the utility". For that I'd need a relatively standard way of uploading this data. I can either write out a file that is then imported from the web page (a 2-stage process for GMs), or call a URL directly with the data (a 1-stage process, but more work to get correct all around). I'm not a web developer, so any comments on this?
Third, and related, is the ability to download a list of all drafted players to Draft Analyzer. I already handle marking draftees by copying-and-pasting from FOF's list. We could either have the draft utilities write this file and let people download it from the web (thus meaning no changes to Draft Analyzer), or I could call a URL from within Draft Analyzer and parse the data I'm sent. Again, comments?
Is there anything else that is difficult on commishes setting these up that I could help with? I'll be doing what I can as WOOF goes forward with its first draft and learning from it, but I'd love to be able to standardize some of this so all leagues can benefit.
The first result of that took less than 24 hours and was the "Draft Order" table that Interrogator spits out. This is just two columns without headers: Pick # and Team ID. The last row is 225/33 to indicate end of the table (as required by HFL). I believe this is straightforward enough that any league can use it without much work on their end if they are not already expecting that, and it should greatly reduce a bunch of hand-editing and searching/replacing in Excel.
However, there are three other areas I'd like to standardize:
First, the draft pool. What columns does everyone want? First name, last name, position, and college seem obvious. Bureau used to be provided, but was dropped from the player report window in 2k7 and thus is not dumped by Extractor (unless this snuck back in to 6.0e, but I have not looked yet). What other columns do people want? If it is just those listed, I can add this table to Interrogator as well, and you've got a very quick extract to get the data needed for the draft utility. Do you want combine numbers as well? Height, weight, anything else? I can either have Interrogator dump a standard table, or add a checkbox to Extractor that will dump a customized table ready for importing. But I'd like to standardize exactly what columns everyone wants (and at the least in such a way that a specific league can ignore columns they aren't interested in).
Second, I would really like to add a feature to Draft Analyzer that lets people upload draft lists to these utilities directly. Something like "send the next 60 undrafted picks to the utility". For that I'd need a relatively standard way of uploading this data. I can either write out a file that is then imported from the web page (a 2-stage process for GMs), or call a URL directly with the data (a 1-stage process, but more work to get correct all around). I'm not a web developer, so any comments on this?
Third, and related, is the ability to download a list of all drafted players to Draft Analyzer. I already handle marking draftees by copying-and-pasting from FOF's list. We could either have the draft utilities write this file and let people download it from the web (thus meaning no changes to Draft Analyzer), or I could call a URL from within Draft Analyzer and parse the data I'm sent. Again, comments?
Is there anything else that is difficult on commishes setting these up that I could help with? I'll be doing what I can as WOOF goes forward with its first draft and learning from it, but I'd love to be able to standardize some of this so all leagues can benefit.