This tab is your final step in generating your schedule. There are two grids on the screen. The top grid lists all possible Calendar Schedule Slots that games can be assigned to. If a game or practice has already been assigned, the Home and Visiting teams will be filled. The bottom grid is the list of games or practices not yet assigned to Calendar Schedule Slots. Immediately after you Generate Games from the Generate Games tab, this grid will have all games or practices listed (note: if you have multiple teams practicing on the same fieldlocation, that fieldlocation will have a listing for each possibly team that can use it). The field Round No. is unique to this process. It first provides an order to how games will be assigned to Calendar Schedule Slots (if using round robin allocation). If random allocations are being used with a weekly frequency, then all games with the same Round No. will be scheduled together the same week. However, in order to satisfy other criteria, the order of the rounds may be changed (i.e. to meet home fieldlocation requirements). For schedules with a daily frequency, the field Round No. is of little use, other than if all other criteria are met, the schedule will assign games in Round No. order but our experience indicates that that will rarely happen. Note that if you have unassigned games, the round number for all those games will be values less than zero.
Tournaments will show several additional columns. The Series and Game Number are listed instead of Round No. Also games will be created with TDB or future winners/losers. These games can and will be scheduled automatically. However, since downstream games can contain any number of different teams, those games are schedule without taking into consider team specific restrictions. Restrictions are enforced where possible.
The software uses a new approximation and pattern matching method for generating the schedule. It starts by reading each Calendar Schedule Slot and determining a raw score for each game in the schedule against the Calendar Schedule Slot. Then the software will optimize the placing of all games on all Calendar Schedule Slots (within certain limits). The software will always attempt to place the games on schedule slots that achieves the best fit to the parameters. However, if you have very few parameters, then many schedule slots may have the same score for a game. In that case, the order that Calendar Schedule Slots are assigned is determined by three parameters. The first is Date, slots are always read in date order. The second sort order is determined by which slots you highlight. You can select as many slots as you want, and within the same date, those slots will be ranked ahead of all others. The third order is the Rank of the Calendar Schedule Slot as entered on the Playing Location Screen. Finally, the option Game Time Slot Selection box is used. By clicking on either Random, Use Earliest or Use Latest, will determine what order time slots are select by Date. Tournaments will always read in Date then Time order first before looking at other factors.
To match Games to Calendar Schedule Slots, click the Match Games to Slots button and the software will try to assign all the games to appropriate Calendar Schedule Slots keeping all parameters in mind. It is possible that not all games will be scheduled and they will appear in the bottom grid, while all assigned games will appear next to the slot they were assigned to.
In order to validate your generated schedule before committing it live to the software (a function that can be undone) there are a number of functions that can help you review the schedule. All headings on both grids when clicked will resort the entries in that sort order. Also, the 'Select Team to Display' dropdown can be used to display only that teams games in the top and bottom grids. Please note that his is only a display function. If you commit games (discussed below) all games are committed and not just the ones showing.
The software will also color code the teams indicating how well their location preferences were met. Dark shades of Red mean a poor match and lighter shades of red and gray indicate a good fit.
Either before or after you match all games to slots, you can assign a single game to a single slot. Highlight the game and slot and click the Assign Game to Slot button. If all home fieldlocation preferences are verified for both the team and location, the game will be assigned. You can assign some known games to certain fieldslocations on certain dates prior to scheduling all the rest. You can also do this afterwards, to include games that the software could not schedule because it may have broken one or more of the constraints you specified.
You can also do the opposite. You can highlight any number of games and click the Unassign Games button. Those games will be removed from the Calendar Schedule slot and placed in the bottom unassigned games grid. If you highlight no games and click this button, the software assumes you wish to unassign all games. It will provide a confirmation message before doing this task.
Some games or calendar slots may have been created just due to the fact that you did not have enough parameters to exclude them. The 'Delete Highlighted Slots' button will delete the temporary game or schedule slot from either grid. The only way to get those games back is to regenerate the games or calendar slots from the Generate tab.
If the assignments are inappropriate you can go back to the parameters tab, change parameters and without regenerating calendar slots or games, go back to the Assign to Slots tab and try the assignment again. Of course if you change parameters that affect the creation of calendar slots or games, they will not be reflected in the schedule unless they are regenerated.
Finally, if you are happy with all the games assign to Calendar Schedule Slots, you can press the Commit Schedule button and the games will become live. You can continue to generate and assign more games under this schedule, but the new set of games you generate and assign do not take into consideration the games already created and committed.
If you wish to save games that were generated but not assigned, clicking the Save Unassigned Games button will save those games and they can either by manually assigned on the Schedule Management Screen, or included in future scheduling runs.