Email player cards with team stats.

[webshowpro]

It would be a time saver to have the option to include the player cards as part of the team stats - preferably as a single PDF file. That way I could just got to the team, click email and get everything delivered all at once.

I'm finding myself exporting 12 players for every team we face, renaming 12 files, then individually uploading each separate PDF. Its starting to get pretty time consuming... (I'm trying to build a scouting database for the teams and players we have faced in the past). Another thing that would be nice would be to have a PDF of the cumulative stats - along with the HTML.

My workflow now includes email myself the stats. Print stats email to a PDF, then upload the PDF to the tournament recap page on our website, along with the PDFs for the individual game scorecards.

[FTMSupport]

There are a couple of problems with emailing the player PDFs together as one. First, most people use them to email to the individual players, and they want to keep the players separated so each player only gets their own stats. Second, the size of the email would wind up getting filtered by many SPAM blockers / email filters.

All of the data is available on the device. The "scouting database" could be iScore itself as you can look at the player card of each opponent right on the device itself and see their stats, hit charts, etc. The cumulative stats are sent in CSV, HTML, and Excel. If you are creating your own database, it seems one of those formats should allow you to populate a database --- PDF is actually the only one that does not allow creating a database as it is more about layout of the page.

[webshowpro]

I should clarify a bit. What I am doing is for every team we face - I have a Wordpress post - that myself and the other coaches can all write to. Each player also has their own post. This centralizes the information for the coaches and allows us to update each team and player with various notes we pick up over time.

As part of each post I wanted to attach the files from iscore as additional resources. so on the team page I have a ODF of that teams stats against us, along with the PDFs score cards. Our opponents roster is on the post and linked to individual player pages. I upload the player card to the player page so its downloadable from there. However, I'd Like to instead have a single PDF available on the team page to make it easier for the head cpach to consolidate team notes.

[FTMSupport]

The PDF's should not have to be renamed in order for you to upload them to Wordpress. Wordpress should be giving it's own unique names to every file that gets uploaded with each post. And actually, because we DO use the same name, you should be able to automate the uploading of the data to Wordpress with scripts. This is the kind of thing that jcbeckman does for example... scripts take the emails we send, and process the data to his database. If we had different names for each attachment, it would ruin any chance of automation.

[webshowpro]

You are correct I CAN upload a file to word press and have it assign a name. its not a big deal when you are only uploading one file at a time. The issue is when MANUALLY processing many files, my work flow goes like this:

1. Open iScore on iPAd
2. Goto games
3. foreach game from weekend
4. email scorecard
5. find opposing team
6. email team stats
7. for each player on each opposing team
8. email player card


9. for each email
10. download file - manually change file name
11. repeat x number of times

12. Sign in to WP admin
13. Goto player page
14. attach file to post
15. select player pdf from my computer (based on file name)
16. upload file
17. attach file to post



If I do not manually change the name of the file in step 10, it is impossible to distinguish the files when uploading in step 15.


I do intend to automate the process down the road, but in my experience its better to manually refine a process before automating it.

I understand that having a static file name simplifies scripting, and that a totally arbitrary file name would make scripting nearly impossible. However, having some details to the existing file name - something like playercard.brandon-phillips.pdf would not significantly impact the script ability, regular expression or even file name globs playercard*.pdf would still allow for automation while also making manual processing more manageable.

[FTMSupport]

As an alternative, you can view the data directly in iScore by selecting the player in Player Manager and going to their player card. If the other coaches had iScore as well, you could use Data Sharing to transfer the games to all of your devices, and iScore would have the data. So when you want to analyze a player, open the player in iScore, and all his info is right there. The website would not need a copy of the data that is readily available right from within the application.

If you want additional information about teams/players beyond raw stats / hit charts, you could still have your Wordpress and just enter notes for that team/player online.

The advantage of doing this is every time you face the team again, you do not have to go through all those steps again --- iScore is automatically showing all data for every player immediately.

We will think about other options that may be able to improve your process, but it is not the name of the PDF file that is causing you to have this many steps... it is a single step. Your #10 would be to use Save As instead of Save when saving the attachment, and add the player name to the file if that is what you want. This should take maybe an extra 5-10 seconds to add the player's name. If you adopted a convention like just initials or just a few letters of each name, it can be even less than 5-10 seconds. When viewing the email, the name of the player is available right in the subject line. So if you are automating this, and you want the player name as part of your file names, you can have your script append the player name to the file name.

Our best suggestion for now would still be to view iScore data in iScore as it is always the "latest and greatest" and does not require the additional steps after every game you play. You can still have your centralized Wordpress system where you and the other coaches can "update each team and player with various notes we pick up over time" for each player on opposing teams.