[Top-l] Vacants (was: Apology and nearest news)

[Libor Forst]

On Tue, May 14, 2024 at 12:07:09AM +0200, Libor Forst wrote:
> The last thing concerns vacants. Vacants in the system need to be connected
> to a particular course so that marshals at timed controls and Toe read-out
> points can easily assign a competitor to a vacant position. And since there
> is a close connection between course and category and at many events there
> are different categories in different races, the vacants are currently bound
> to the race and not to the event. This brings another advantage if you have
> not enough chips and you expect many different newcomers coming to different
> races within your event - you can use Vacant1 with the same chip for someone
> in the Saturday race and another in the Sunday race. On the other hand, this
> brings a relatively complicated system and user interface whenever you want
> to assign a person to a vacant position for the entire event. :-( And so I
> started thinking about changing the approach and working with a vacant like
> with a real person just without a name. It means you should define how many
> vacants you want to have for each category within the event, to have chips
> for them and when a vacant is assigned to a real person it is permanent for
> the whole event. This change will not be implemented in the near future, so
> you have relatively enough time to think about whether you have an opinion
> on it.

Finally, I came to conclusion to remove the idea of vacants at all...!
Vacants are needed for three reasons:
A) To create some spare slots in the startlist.
B) To properly store answers and times at timed control for a competitor
   who is not in the original startlist.
C) To know course structure when reading out chips of a late registered
   competitor.

Ad A) Free slots can be made relatively easily manually. I've added a new
   feature for adding and removing more slots in the startlist at once.

Ad B) I've added a new feature to ANT to use a startnumber for a complete
   identification of a competitor. So typing the startnumber is sufficient
   and the marshal only needs to ask the competitor for his class so that
   the results will be stored to the proper file. Pre-assigned vacants in
   the startlist are no more needed.

Ad B) I've added a new feature to ANT to allow assigning a course (class)
   for an unknown chip coming to the read-out point, similarly like it was
   already implemented at timed controls. And similarly, the marshal also
   asks the competitor for his class and ANT will read out the chips like
   if the competitor was in the startlist. So the need to have pre-assigned
   vacant places is again no more important.

The recommended procedure with in-situ registration is now: register the
new entry for a proper category, use a startnumber and chip suggested by
TOP and let the competitor go to the course. Reading out and timed control
process will work with using the chip and startnumber respectively. All the
complicated planning work with vacants is no more needed.

Sincerely L