TkScore User's Guide

Checking the report

On the Reports menu on the main window, you can select Show Report to produce a plain text file containing the report in TICA Trend format. The report will be presented in a viewer. This is an opportunity to do a final check of the result. Things to watch out for might be:

Misaligned columns caused by stray tab characters in the name or breed fields,
Duplicated finals columns,
Missing finals,
Missing names,
Incorrect judges' initials.

Once you have reviewed the report, you can upload the TkScore database to ticamembers.org. You can also save the text report to a plain text file, which can be posted to mailing lists.

Uploading the data

To upload your report, you will need to be connected to the Internet, and simply select File->Upload. A dialog box will appear, showing whether the upload was successful or not. If it was successful, it will give the URL that was assigned to your file on the server. (You can download your .tks file by that URL, if you happen to lose your copy). If the upload was not successful, it should give some indication of the reason. (The message "Bad hostname" may actually mean that you don't currently have Internet access).

Uploaded reports will appear on the ticamembers.org web site after they have been processed into HTML and compiled into the estimated standings. That process is done at irregular intervals, so don't count on it appearing immediately.

Posting the report

The best method for posting the report to a mailing list depends on the behavior or your e-mail program and the way the mailing list handles text and attachments. In general, the best way to send a report through e-mail is to save it to a file from the report viewer and simply attach that file to an e-mail message.

The Yahoo! Groups TICAMEMBERS group does accept e-mail with plain text attachments (that's the only kind of attachment that it will accept). Submitting the report as a plain text attachment preserves the formatting of the text, so that the report will be readable, provided that the recipient uses a fixed-space font for viewing it. Copying and pasting the report into the body of a message may produce unsatisfactory results. For example, if your mailer composes the message as HTML, the Yahoo! Groups server will strip out all the spaces, which destroys all the report formatting. That is just one of many ways that a report can get mangled in transmission.

Other regional mailing lists may have different procedures for handling text, some do not accept any kind of attachment, and some e-mail programs will encode attachments in strange ways. It is not possible to describe here the proper procedures for handling all the possible combinations of softare at the sending and receiving ends.

Report format options

There are three options available at the bottom of the report viewer which control the format of the show report. These controls only affect the output; they do not modify anything in the data base.

The "Name Length" parameter specifies the number of characters reserved for the name of each cat on the report. The default is 36, which is the limit set by the TICA Registration Rules. (Sometimes exhibitors submit longer names to the entry clerks, but the Executive Office ignores that; the name that is in the TICA Registry is the name that will appear on the official standings and the regional/international awards at the end of the show season).
The "Column Width" parameter specifies the number of characters reserved for each column of finals. This is set to 3 by default, which gives the most compact report. For a tiny show with four rings or less, you might want to increase it to spread out the columns, to keep the report from being visually odd.
The "Print Scores" checkbutton causes TkScore to print the points it has calculated for the purpose of ranking the entries on the report. These are not "real" points, since we have no way of knowing if all these finals are among any given cat's top 50 scores. This is useful, however, if there is a question as to why the ranking on the report doesn't match the Best of the Best calculation done by the club. This option is turned off by default.

Previous | Contents | Next

David Thomas (showreports@ticamembers.org)

14 July 2012