March Madness

[ddreese]

Solution: March Madness

Description: A basic application to score March Madness brackets. Beware, it's a bit rough and hasn't been thoroughly tested - I usually use it until I find a problem.

It's a 'brute force' solution I thought of last year that seems to work pretty well, though in no way elegant. I think any scoring bugs may have been worked out by now.

Working Under:

Solution Status: Untested

Pre-requisites: NA

Author(s) ddreese

Date: 03/07/08

Credits: NA

Instructions / Other Info: This is a fairly rough version of the database that I created last year. This year I've made some changes to integrate this file with the database all the employees use so it's right there (and I don't have to enter any brackets anymore). I also have tried to make concessions for allowing multiple years of brackets so you can have a history.

Like I said it's rough, some stuff might not work from changing things around for this year, but I thought that this may be helpful to some of you who may run office pools like I do.

If you want to make this work for you, you're going to have to have a decent understanding of FM and scripts and privilege sets, etc. Chances are you going to have to change/add some scripts to suit your needs since this is not longer a 'standalone' application for me, I've taken out some of the data entry niceties on the main menu. Please take that into consideration.

The basics are as follows:

- Use username admin with not password to access the file. Feel free to remove the unnecessary user accounts.

- Create a new 'Master Bracket' record in the master_bracket table. Make sure you put the year in, as that's how it's linked/scored with the other brackets.

- New brackets start in the 'bracket' table. Upon creation the (scripted - not calculated or a 'lookup') bracket looks to the master bracket and copies the first round of games into the 'round_1' table. Again, make sure all brackets in this table are getting the 'Year' put in correctly. I have it as an auto-enter calc, but it seems that it's not 100% reliable sometimes.

- The 'rounds' are split up into different tables. I'm not sure why I did this, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, hah!

- On the entry screen, the little green arrows next to the team advances the team through the bracket. I have a script that runs that if you have a team advancing far into the bracket, and then change your mind and select the other team, it's supposed to go through and clean up the previous team name throughout the bracket. Granted, I was the only one who used this last year, but it seemed to work well for me. YMMV

- There are a few reports/lists. Here where I work I post the results on my door (printout), as well as on our intranet site (export). This will be un-necessary this year because everyone will be able to see it from their computers from my other (useful, work related) database.

- On the main menu screen there is a global 'year' field. Remember to have the year selected before doing the 'list brackets' or 'edit master bracket'.

- Home screen buttons will not work, as they run a script in my other database. Also there is a relationship or two that is no longer necessary.

Disclaimer:

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March_Madness.zip