ICS 499: Road to Redemption

After a gruesome past week of our class’s previous implementation of the Devcathlon, we were finally making really good progress. Development started moving along when two members of the class, who were assigned to implement the initialization file, finished and instructed the rest of the class members on how to use that file.

The part of the Devcathlon I am in charge with is the Match Manager, which has the ability to create a match and reconfigure matches already in the system. With the help of initialization file, I was able to retrieve most of the data needed within the system; data such as, teams the user is owner an owner of, the user’s opposing teams, and a list of events related to the match. Everything was moving along fine until I realized that I did not only need a list of events that a match has, but also the list of all the events that are in the system. I haven’t overcome this problem just yet, I have been researching on ways to pull up all the events in the system.

I also saw that in order to create a match, the user must enter an end date for that match. The end date is in a format called the XMLGregorianCalendar; which looks like “1969-07-16T00:00:00”, Year-Month-DateTHour:Minutes:Milliseconds. Having the user to enter a date in that format seems unfriendly; so rather than using the unfriendly format, the user would enter the typical Month/Date/Year format. I haven’t quit figured out yet on the parsing of the end date input, all the approaches I took seem to have crash the system. The simplest way I got it to work was having three different input fields, one for month, one for date, and one for year; but still seemed a little lame having three input fields instead of one.

For this new week of development, I look to solving the list of events problem and the end date problem for a match. I also look to implement a way to retrieve the description of each event and have it display on the web interface. The road to accomplishment seems so far yet so close, but for now this is our road to redemption in the eyes of our client.

A match's configuration page.

Creating a new match page.