Greetings, judges

I’m Alex Papageorgiou, or as some of you may know me, the cheerful Greek guy with the impossible last name. After last week’s long awaited Judge Center relaunch turning into a spectacular show of fireworks, I felt now would be a good time to introduce our very own, much smaller judge tech widget!

It all started with Elli’s idea: “Hey, I’m putting all of Greece’s event in a calendar every month, couldn’t we like, automate it? It is 2017 after all”. I mean, her wording may not have been exactly that, but that was what I heard. And so it began…

MtgEventToCal is a small Java application, hosted on github . What it does is take a list of stores, using their wizards event locator links, visit them, filter the events (PPTQs only for now) and then create the equivalent events on the provided Google Calendar. We plan to use it for the Greek event calendar but it could be much, much more. Regional PPTQ calendars, GPs, it could all be automated!

Prerequisites:

• Google account with calendar enabled
  
• Browser (well, you're reading this so…)
  

Instructions:
1) Go to https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1#main_7%7Cmonth

2) Add alexbotcentral@gmail.com to the calendar you wish it to make changes to.
- Give it ‘Make changes to events’ permissions
Hint: You can also create another calendar if you want to leave your main one unaffected

3) Go to http://83.212.104.169:8889/

4) Copy the calendar ID from your Google Calendar into the first field of the app

5) Get the links to the stores you want. For reference, we copy paste our list from here:
https://blogs.magicjudges.org/greece/balkan_tos/

6) Click insert and be patient (as in, 5-10 minutes or so patient)


#FAQ

• Why Java when language/framework X is better for the task?
  If you wanna make something else, be my guest. No really, pull requests are welcome. We wanted to use this as a learning experience first and foremost and to offer something to the community that created trouble to us previously.
  
  
• Why create it in this weirdly specific way?
  Because it started with solving our own particular problem and we are working on generalizing the logic.
  
  
• Wow, your code looks so messy
  Monastery Mentor
  

#Goals

• We are currently on Swing for practice reasons - it should switch to JavaFX which at least looks like the 2010s instead of 2000s.
  
• Use judge feedback and update suggestions to improve the front-end
  
• Make a simpler input method for the links
  

I hope this helps at least one of the people currently doing this task manually. Feel free to write to me or this thread for any problems encountered - I'm fairly horrible in writing documentation, so as soon as you come across I haven't covered, fire away!

Edited Alexander Papageorgiou (May 3, 2018 03:00:19 PM)

How do we open up the .jar file/application?

Hello Dennis,

If you are on windows, it should be runnable by double clicking it. If there is a problem doing that, I just added a runMe file for windows inside the zip, which you can just run. In both cases you need java installed first!

Dennis, I think you need have at least a JRE (Java Runtime Environment for End User) or JDK (Java SE Development Kit for Developer) installed on your machine to run Java program. You should be able to get them through here if you machine doesn't have any yet: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

I found a bug: How do I use this button doesn't work…

I have installed the program. Managed to open up the app. Have the Calendar Link & Link, but I can't get it to populate.

Is there any problems with my link?
http://mtgjudgesg.blogspot.sg/2017/09/

Is there an easy way to have it search by area? Aka– put in an address and distance range : output the appropriate calendar

Sent from my iPhone

Dennis I don't see any problem with your link.
Something we forgot to add is that you have to authorise your google account to use google calendar API.
(https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/quickstart/java) (just do step 1)
If this doesn't help feel free to contact us again, maybe providing a screenshot of the exit message.

Bryan Maybe that will be an upcoming feature but right now you have to manually add the stores you want.

It doesn't seem to populate the information on the google calendar.
I have allowed authorised google acc to use the app. So, I'm not too sure where or which part went wrong.

Calender ID: fpsfgqhgmijdbn3lb8rfo071fg@group.calendar.google.com
Link: http://mtgjudgesg.blogspot.sg/2017/09/

.

Hello everyone!

Changes are here! We figured out that our current build, including the authentication created a lot of problems, so we completely reworked everything and hopefully, it seems simpler that way. :)

The main post has been updated with new instructions :)

Btw, a great big thanks to our testers so far: Your feedback has been very helpful in showing us what's wrong and what we can do better! :)

A bug has been fixed which caused some events kept in memory to be added to your calendar - thanks Rami Abdo!

Small update: The initial link has changed slightly (it's now another port). The new one is:

http://83.212.104.169:8889/

Some functionality bugs have been reported, I will be looking into those soon

Sadly, the project has to be shut down. Because of the design flow Wizards Event Locator website uses, it is nearly impossible to get the information of events in an easy way. Recent changes made this even harder than before, effectively making our software a death march for people to work on.

There is a small chance we may resurrect this project, but only if/when the website has changed.

Thanks, to everyone who took part!