Re: [Bug-gnubg] player accounts

[Jim Segrave]

On Thu 15 Jul 2004 (09:40 +0100), Jon Kinsey wrote:
> Chris Alvino wrote:
> 
> >Is there any current programming work going on in the area of player 
> >records, similar to the account manager for Snowie?  It is one of 
> >gnubg's only weak points in my opinion.
> 
> There is some new work started to put the player records in a database.
> 
> I'm busy at the minute but may have a look at adding the ui side to this 
> when I come back from holiday in a couple of weeks time.

I've finally got round to playing with the database setup (and looking
into learning Python at the same time). One thing that immediately
strikes me is that there is a package Tkinter.py which gives a Python
class library for building windowed applications, which uses Tk and in
turn gtk. I gather from the O'Reilly Programming Python book that it's
available for Windows as well. There's also gnuplot available for
Windows and a Python gnuplot interface module, again available for
both Window and Unix platforms.

For jobs like account management and running queries and plotting
results on the game history, this should be an easier way to get a
compatible look and feel interface for these jobs with a much lower
development threshold. It would keep these tasks separated from gnubg
itself, which is probably a very good thing.

Many of the queries I would think users might want to make would be
something on the order of:

specify one or both of the players involved
select which fields should be returned 
select a sorting order (if any)
set a maximum number of records to be returned
select an output method - csv or windowed display (with scrolling and
a copy button).

We use something like this for a database of log records for dial-up
users of Demon - there's a (in this case web) page where you can
select a few conditions for what records you want - account name,
date, time, caller-ID, modem server cnnected to, etc. Theres a select
list of which fields you will get back and how many records you want
to limit it to. It builds an SQL query and displays the results or
writes them to a file. It's surprisingly powerful and easily used by
non-technical people.

Similarly - a simple Tkinter windowed interface for doing simple
operations - adding data to a march or game record or a player record
would be easy to do in this environment.

-- 
Jim Segrave           address@hidden