Bowrap-Web Demonstration

Welcome to the demonstration league

General:
Direct entry user guide
League management user guide
Bowrap-League user guide

This is a fictitious league, used to demonstrate the features of the Bowrap-League software.

Start from the Tables link at the top of the page, and browse around. Mostly, division names, team names and player names are links (in blue text) and will lead you to more detail. The Help link on most pages describes what sort of data the page contains. You can't get lost - there is always a link back to the home page (this page) and to the main page of league tables.

Bowrap-League

Fixture generation

Front page

Competitions

Direct entry

Archives

Getting started

Bowrap-League

Bowrap-League is the program that league secretaries traditionally used to manage their league. It’s a Windows application. The idea is that you maintain a complete record of the season in a data file on your PC. A simple command sends this file to the server, where the web site is updated to match the current state.

As match results come in, the league secretary records the details in Bowrap-League. He or she can also manage player registrations. Bowrap-League has now been used for twenty years, and it can cope most things that crop up in a bowling league. You can rename or delete teams, or apply penalty points to them.

Bowrap-League is still used by many leagues. Nowadays the same job can instead be done entirely on-line. The two methods can’t be used at the same time, but a switch from one to the other can easily be arranged.

Please refer to the user guides:

• Bowrap-League.pdf
• LeagueManagement.pdf

Fixture generation

There is a separate section on the site describing the problems of generating a set of fixtures. An Excel spreadsheet is also available which can tackle most of these problems.

Front page

For a simple web site, the first page that users land on is the Tables page, showing the league tables for all divisions. A league can instead have a Front page (like this one) where the league secretary can post news items and set up links to orher sites (such as neighbouring leagues).

This page is managed independently of Bowrap-League: using and web browser.

The user guide is available through the link above left.

Competitions

The web site can also handle knock-out competitions. The Tables page has links to the competitions for the current season.

Individual and doubles comps

These competitions are managed through the front page. The interfaca allows you to set up a competition (including doing the draw if required). Once the draw exists, the ties can be updated to show the winners and the scores. Winners are automatically propagated to the next round.

Team (and team doubles) competitions

These competitions have traditionally been managed through the front page. They can now instead be run through Bowrap-League. This has the advantage that the full details of the competition matches are shown on the web site.

Direct entry

Traditionally, team captains send their match sheet to the fixture secretary, who does all the data processing. Nowadays the sheets are often sent by e-mail, and the league tables can be updated the same day the matches are played. The league secretary has full control, especially when it comes to ruling on tricky subjects like ineligible or unregistered players. Most leagues on this site still operate like this.

A league can be set up to use Direct entry. Every team is issued with a user name and password. They can use these to log in and enter their own match results on the web site. The league tables are updated instantly (as are all the other details like players' averages).

A match result can be entered by either team, but only in the week following the match. The fixture secretary has greater powers: he or she can update matches at any time.

You can try out direct entry on this site. From a match page, click on the Edit match link. You will need to log in: the user name and password are both demo.

The league secretary's log in also allows access to the Manage Players system (there's a link to this at the top of the page). This is where the league registers players (and deletes or renames them if necessary).

Archives

Once the seaon is finished, the results are transferred to the archives. Except in the first year, every league has an Archives link at the top of every page. This provides quick links to past seasons.

Once in the archives section, there is a Search option. This allows users to search for past results by league name, club name, season or player names. It can return results from all the leagues archived on this site.

Getting started

Bowrap-League has a league's rules encoded into it. These include the way match results are decided (chalks, points per win etc), and how players are ranked for the averages prize or similar.

The software also understands rules about player elgibility (typically, the circumstances where players can move from the first team to lower teams. It can report on apparent breaches of these rules, though it's up to the league management to decide what to do about them.

For these reasons, the first step is to supply a copy of the league rules.

The program also knows about the fixtures, so it can report on things like overdue match results. So the fixtures are needed every season. They can be supplied in any reasonable machine-readable format.