New Release 9.3

Here we go again with this new seasonal delivery, see what's new coming out:

Performances

Was time to make some renewed testing and ground works concerning Wiclax behavior under heavy constraints. Continuous development and integration of new features means also continuous care to provide on these aspects. This time we've focused on mass races configurations, lots of participants and lots of timing locations.

Sparing you complex details about how things are working in the black box, we've eliminated a certain number of bottlenecks and made a better use of parallel task processing. No compromise with Wiclax excellence anyway, with any ranking still computed in real time and ready to be printed/exported/broadcasted. Hoping you'll appreciate the improvements!

Calculated fields

You've already seen them in the custom data section of an event, where you have the ability to enter a calculation formula to feed such a field.

What's new is that we've introduced a few Wiclax specific functions that can be used within formulas:

• TimeToMs(), MsToTime(), AddTimes(), SubTimes(), which can be used to make operations with Wiclax time values.
• WxVar(), which takes as argument any variable identifier as per listed in the custom export format reference that you've maybe already discovered for other purposes. For example among many other possibilities you can obtain the number of finishers in the participant category.

Points calculation

Similarly, we've introduced the ability to edit a custom formula to use for the points calculation. For cases where simple lists of points to award based on place in rankings is not flexible enough.

Bundle reports

Bundle reports are still called Stage summary in Wiclax, cause it's a must have in the context of a cycling stage race. But we aim at giving it a wider purpose like for example when you're requested 2 complementary reports as a single document.

So we continue to refactor a lot of things to bring more flexibility at all levels. Here's a summary of the latest improvements:

• quick selection of reports to embed, each item can be just temporarily disabled
• multiple predefined templates: standard, compact and 2 columns (configurations can be imported/exported and soon to come will be the ability to save a custom list with the event file)
• for each report you can choose a max number of rows, and specify its layout is multi columned
• on the print preview you can click on a sub report and access its own layout options. This includes for example selecting which data fields to print - specifically for this bundle report configuration, choosing a vignette layout, etc...
• at general level you can say the report will start with some cover pages. Combined with the new race communiqués feature, it becomes possible to fill them with some custom graphical content.

Race communiqués

Race communiqués become fully managed with the event: recording of items for each stage, free edition with Word-style formatting and availability for inclusion in a stage summary report. Ideal for cycling races but also to enrich any type of document printed from Wiclax.

Live screens

Continuing with making Live screens design as fun as powerful, 2 great new features:

• some predefined style templates can be applied in one click to result/participant list widgets, sparing you some research on how to tweak CSS style by yourself. Please share your displays if you don't find anything close in this selection, we'll be happy to enrich it.
• access added to the whole list of Google fonts for your screen styling, just pick any from the list.

Prize money

A must have for Criterium like bike races, but not only, a new module delivers this feature.

You can easily setup a new awarding lap during the race, simply entering its prize grid.

For other purposes than prize money, you can also now automatically grant points or time bonuses based on the passing order at a given lap (for races managed as lap races).

Result exchange and/or transfer

Though different scenarios have to be considered and it's not always easy to just have a clear thinking about which operations have to be performed, we've introduced a new dialog aiming at clarifying options when some result data have to be transferred to another participant. Most usual use case is dealing with a bib/chip physical allocation mistake.

Hoping you'll feel more confident with it.

Going along, a new contextual menu Initialize with data from another participant brings the ability to quickly copy registration data under a given bib number. Ideal in case you decide to keep an 'unknown participant' as it comes, with the chip he's wearing, but knowing he was initially registered under a different bib number.

Exporters

We continue to extend possibilities for exports in JSON format - either as local files or as TCP data stream. A data preview now facilitates testing and further processing by external programs.

Arrival graphs

New display mode available to visualize segment times in a stacked view. Makes things easier to spot any eventual anomaly, like a segment obviously too short/long or a missing intermediate time.

Miscellaneous

Result publication: a new publication option allows to activate the display of a 'Provisional ranking' warning banner on the web side.

Lap races: the number of laps to perform for a race can now be modified through a shortcut available from the race statistics & control panel.

Note that we're also introducing here a concept of Active race. This will be important for a context where you have several races or heats defined in the file but only one at a time is going to be competed.

Team data import: to ease some scenarios of participant data processing, a new option provides the ability to merge some independent individual data rows into a single registration in Wiclax. I.e. a single bib, where teammate names will be concatenated.

Real bib numbers: new option for automatic calculation of real bib numbers (those finally appearing on printouts and exports), with addition/subtraction applied to the technical bib. Option available from the race bib numbers setting.

Podiums: in some rare occasions you can be asked to calculate some podiums based on a category set (age groups) which is not exactly the one applied to participants in the file. Now possible with this menu selection:

Conditional formatting: From the contextual menu of a column header (main grids) it's now possible to define formatting rules for the cells, Excel style. For example red+bold if value>xxx.