[CalendarX-users] Extending CalendarX to the Sports World

[Mark Phillips]

Hello,

I have been working on enhancing CalendarX to display schedules for sports
events, in particular,for our local little league schedule. We have about
1,100 players in baseball and softball, and our calendar has about 800 games
and 200 practices in a season (~88 teams, 14 divisions, and 11 fields) when
all is said and done. You can see a prototype of the calendar at
www.arcadialittleleague.com under the calendar tab. It is very slow - I have
to move it to another faster server soon.

I extended the event class to make a game class that holds all the fields
needed for a game (home & visitor team, division, league; field; umpire,
etc.) I then modified CalendarX to allow searching for events based on some
of these criteria. So far, it works! Also, I highly recommend ArcheCSV to
anyone who needs to create a large number of objects in Plone. It has worked
flawlessly so far to translate out Excel based schedules to CalendarX.

I would be interested in any feeback on the operation of the calendar. In
particular, it takes a long time to load the calendar. If anyone has any
suggestions on how to speed it up, I would appreciate some direction on how
to improve it. I built the same calendar using a JSP and tomcat last year,
and that calendar runs on a Pentium II server and is much faster than the
CalendarX version running on a Pentium III with 3X the memory!

Have a nice day!

[Mark Phillips]

Johannes,

Thank you for your response.

I did not change the way CalendarX performs its queries. I added a script to
create a new query based on the input values from the calendar form, but did
not change the flow of the program for querying the ZODB and returning the
results. All the fields in my GameEvent object are indexed as metadata, so
the query should be fast. I am using the AdvancedQuery option, which
according to the CalendarX documentation says does not impact performance.

With that said, I will look more closely at my GameEvent to make sure it is
doing what I think it is. This is my first plone development project, so I am
sure I will learn more as I dig under the covers.

Thanks again!

Mark

Hello Mark,
usually it is crucial, not to wake up the event object for the rendering of
the calendar but to take all the information, you need, out of the
metadata.
Maybe you want to check your source for myevent.getObject(), which pulls
the real object from the ZODB, -- very expensiv!
Bye, Johannes