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On-line chess result database: help window

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Introduction

Welcome to WebLeagues. This system permits league secretaries to set up leagues on-line. Team managers can log in and submit match results as soon as a match is over; the league table and cross-table of results are updated and displayed instantly. No more submitting results and waiting for days or weeks (or even longer) for the secretary to update the website!

The leagues displayed here are for chess matches, with up to 20 players per side playing individual games that can be either won, drawn or lost. However, the concept is simply extended to other sports.

This document provides some quick pointers to the functions that are available to the different classes of users:

Functions available to a casual browser

Viewing League Tables

On the home page are two lists of leagues: one for those that are currently 'in play', and one for leagues that have been completed. Click on the name of any league and you will see:

Viewing Results

Click on any score in the cross-table and the detailed board-by-board result will be displayed.

Functions available to a Team Manager

In addition to the above, designated team managers can use the 'log in' link to log into the site. This opens up some extra functions.

Submitting Results

Click the 'add' link in the cross-table to add results for your own team. A results form is displayed; fill it in and click the 'submit' button. Pick player names from the drop-down lists; if a player (for either team) is missing then use one of the 'add player' buttons to add him/her to the list. If you do not manage one of the teams you will get an error message; if you do, the submitted result will be displayed for confirmation, followed by the updated league table and cross-table.

Viewing Results

Click on the score in the cross-table and the detailed board-by-board result will be displayed. For any result submitted by the opposing team, you will get a 'confirm' link. Confirmed results are displayed in bold type in the cross-table. Unconfirmed results are included in the points tables, but should be regarded as provisional.

Deleting Results

Upon viewing any result that you submitted, you will get a 'delete' link. Click it to remove the result from the cross-table and from the points calculation in the league table.

Confirming Results

Upon viewing any result submitted by the opposing team, you will get a 'confirm' link. Click this to confirm; the date confirmed and the username of the confirmer will be recorded, and the result will be displayed in bold type in the cross-table. (Unconfirmed results are included in the points tables, but should be regarded as provisional.)

Have a go!

There is a trial league set up to enable new users to experiment. It's called 'Test League -- have a play!', and contains a team called 'Visitors'. The team manager for 'Visitors' is user 'guest'. If you log on as 'guest' with password 'welcome', you will be able to submit and delete results for the Visitors team. The set-up for this league has been altered to match the Oxford and District league rather than the schools' league, i.e. 2 points for a match win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss, with home and away matches between each pair of teams.

Functions available to the 'owner' of a club

Amend club details

If you are designated as the owner of a club's entry, you will see an 'edit' icon edit graphic and a 'delete' icon delete graphic in the title bar of your club's entry in the club list.

Amend player list

As a club owner, you can amend the stored details (name, grade code) for one of your players. You may also delete a player from your list, provided that he has not played any matches for you. You may flag as 'inactive' a player leaving your club: he or she would still be in the database, so old results would not break, but would no longer appear in your club's drop-down lists for submitting new results.

Functions available to a League Secretary

League secretaries see some extra links. A set of links alongside the name of each league permits the secretary to:

A further pair of links at the bottom of the screen caters for creating new leagues and adding new users.

Amending league parameters

Each league has a designated league secretary. In addition to defining the teams and their managers (see below) the secretary may also set:

Adding Teams

Alongside the league name, league secretaries see an extra link to add teams. Clicking the link displays a list of the teams that are part of that league to date, with a box to input the name of a new team.

Adding Users

As a league secretary you may set up new usernames and passwords for team managers. It is helpful to define the team managers before adding the teams because then the manager may be picked from the existing list; otherwise you will have to go back to the team details once the manager's username has been set up, and define the manager.

Adding and Confirming Results

League secretaries may also add and confirm results. Hence it is possible to use the WebLeagues system even if not all the team managers have web access: send the results to the secretary in the 'traditional' manner, and he can add them.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to colleague Andy Thompson who had the same idea (but applied to football), and whose initial framework plus more advanced Cold Fusion skills gave me a flying start.

Roger Thetford, Harwell. November 2003.