Posting rosters on ProFSL forum

[kenny]

Some people have expressed their displeasure with how the rosters are presented in AFB. Unfortunately, due to the intricacies of this league, a spreadsheet is a necessity to keep track of everything efficiently. We can't *just* post rosters as text like some other leagues do.

However, because of this, I've been working on automating the roster spreadsheet so it outputs the roster in BBC (BB Code, used by ProFSL on this forum for special formatting). It takes some time to set up, but in the long run it'll be worth it. I wrote some code for the template for the 40 man roster and applied it to the Pirates roster so you can see how it looks. You can get to it by clicking on the Pirates logo in the header when you're on the main AFB forum (http://profsl.com/smf/index.php?topic=20179.0).  If you have any comments or a wishlist, I can try to modify it to accommodate it, but options are limited due to Excel, BBC and for the sake of efficiency.

Some things can only be found in the spreadsheet, such as age, service time and whether or not it's a guaranteed contract.

Don't mind the minor league portion of it yet. Still working on that.

Thanks,
Kenny

[kenny]

Also note that you can only see the current year and the four following years for player contracts on the posting. Limited due to space.

[ldsjayhawk]

This is excellent!  I think this will be very helpful.  If you want to include that it is a guaranteed contract, maybe you could add a symbol after the player name?  Maybe the year next to their name if the contract extends further?  Both are extranneous and not needed in my mind.  But I am excited about this!  (Doesn't take much, does it?  )

[kenny]

I can probably include a '#' after their name to indicate guaranteed contract. I'd have to manually do this for each player but shouldn't take much time.

Let me think about adding the year the contract ends. I don't want to do that manually, and at the moment, I'm not sure if I can code that in.

[Lindner]

This is awesome Kenny.  Its a great start.  There are probably a couple things that could be added and there are some things that could add to the look-and-feel of the page, but its a great start!

I'm not sure how to do it, but it would nice to get some commas in the numbers.

$440,000 is a lot easier to read than $440000.

[kenny]

You would think adding commas is one of the easier things to do but it's not. This is due to the salary cell being in a "currency" format and when Excel grabs the number, it only sees the value - no commas or $. I had added the $ myself in the forum code to each forum cell.

What we can possibly do is instead of showing the salary in units of dollars, we can do it in units of millions of dollars. For example, it would show $.4 for for $400,000 or $5.2529 for $5,252,900. Let me know if you guys prefer this.

Any other comments on the look and feel? Now is the time to voice your opinion.

Going back to displaying the last year of the contract, for the most part 5 years is enough because the maximum new contract is 5 years. The rookie contracts are 6 years and we have some pre-exisiting long term contracts. If I shrink the text size, I may be able to fit the 6th year in, so we'd be cover for 99% of the players. Not sure how people's visions are though so might not be a good change.

Writing out the last year of the contract would probably entail cutting the display from 5 years to 4 years. I'm not sure if that's a good idea (if it's even possible to code).

[Lindner]

You would think adding commas is one of the easier things to do but it's not. This is due to the salary cell being in a "currency" format and when Excel grabs the number, it only sees the value - no commas or $. I had added the $ myself in the forum code to each forum cell.

What we can possibly do is instead of showing the salary in units of dollars, we can do it in units of millions of dollars. For example, it would show $.4 for for $400,000 or $5.2529 for $5,252,900. Let me know if you guys prefer this.

Any other comments on the look and feel? Now is the time to voice your opinion.

Going back to displaying the last year of the contract, for the most part 5 years is enough because the maximum new contract is 5 years. The rookie contracts are 6 years and we have some pre-exisiting long term contracts. If I shrink the text size, I may be able to fit the 6th year in, so we'd be cover for 99% of the players. Not sure how people's visions are though so might not be a good change.

Writing out the last year of the contract would probably entail cutting the display from 5 years to 4 years. I'm not sure if that's a good idea (if it's even possible to code).

I had a feeling that the commas would be tough to incorporate.  I like the idea of making putting a decimal point there ($.4 = $400k).  That seems like a good spot.

I don't think that there will be any issues with only having 5 columns.  Eventually all of those contracts will fall into the 5-year spectrum.  I'm not worried about the prospect contracts because everyone knows that the 6th year is just an ARB year.

[kenny]

I made one change. Salaries are expressed in millions of dollars instead of dollars. It looks like I can fit one more column in. Is this better?

[kenny]

The other suggestions Lindner made to formatting will be incorporated as well. Just didn't get around to it. Moving the decimal point over a few spots was trickier than I thought and took longer than I anticipated.

[kenny]

Also got rid of the "$" next to ARB, 2Year, 3Year and in blank cells. The Excel formula is a monster now, lol, but I'm starting to like the output.

This code gives you one row in the 40 man roster:

Code: [Select]

=CONCATENATE("[TR][TD]",B15,"[/TD][TD]",IF(ISNUMBER(M15),CONCATENATE("$",M15/1000000),M15),"[/TD][TD]",IF(ISNUMBER(N15),CONCATENATE("$",N15/1000000),N15),"[/TD][TD]",IF(ISNUMBER(O15),CONCATENATE("$",O15/1000000),O15),"[/TD][TD]",IF(ISNUMBER(P15),CONCATENATE("$",P15/1000000),P15),"[/TD][TD]",IF(ISNUMBER(Q15),CONCATENATE("$",Q15/1000000),Q15),"[/TD][/TR]")