Practice data

Practice data is a complete, invented show: an organizing body, exhibitors with their own login details, breeders, dogs, shows with their events, rings, judges, entries and — depending on how far you ask it to go — judgments and awards.

It is generated in one pass, from a short form, and it lives in the same database as your real data without ever mixing with it. It is how you rehearse a show day before you run one, and how a new member of the office learns the application without being able to break anything.

What it is not: a copy of your real data with the names changed — nothing is taken from your real shows — and not a sandbox on a separate server. It lives in your database, so anything you break in a practice set costs nothing, but anything you send leaves your system for real. Read the section on emails before you generate a large set.

Creating a set

Open system and go to the Test tab.

Set name is written on every record the set produces and shown in front of every generated name, so you always know what you are looking at. Keep it short: Test1, Training-March.

Target phase is the important choice — how far along the generated shows should be. The section below goes through the six.

The rest are quantities: Shows, Events per show, Exhibitors (each with their own login), Dogs shared among them, and the Base price the generated events start from. Twenty exhibitors and forty dogs over two shows of two events is a good first set.

Breed limits decides whether the generated events admit all groups and all breeds or only some — useful for rehearsing a restricted show. Split breeds ratio is the share of breeds handed to two judges instead of one, so that case can be rehearsed too.

Press Generate. A progress bar appears and stays there while the work goes on; you can close the browser and come back later, the work continues on the server.

Generating is not instant. A set with the suggested values takes several minutes, and larger sets considerably longer — most of the time goes into creating the exhibitor accounts and the entries, and both grow with the numbers you choose. Start small the first time.

Choosing the target phase

Each phase includes everything the ones above it produce. Pick the one that matches what you want to rehearse.

1 — Organized, waiting for entries. Everything is ready except the entries: the organizing body, the exhibitors with their accounts, the breeders, the dogs, the shows with their events and rings, and the judges already assigned to the breeds. The shows are about a month and a half away, so registration is open and no closing date has passed. Use it to go through the entry process by hand, as an exhibitor would.

2 — Entries open, entries received. As above, plus the entries themselves; about six exhibitors in ten have entered each show, and nothing is closed. Use it to rehearse the office's daily work while registration is open — looking entries up, adding, changing and withdrawing them.

3 — Entries closed, dogs assigned to rings. The shows move to three days from now. Every entry is paid and closed, and the dogs are distributed to the rings of their judges, with the judging order and the start times worked out. Use it to rehearse the last days before a show: printing the catalog, checking the ring lists, producing the documents.

4 — Event running, nothing judged yet. The shows are today and their events are running right now. The ring accounts exist, three for each ring, and judging is marked as started. Nothing has been judged, which is the point: everything is still to be done by hand. Use it to rehearse show day on the tablets.

5 — Judged, last show still running. Every dog has its quality level and the first four of each group their placement. All the shows are in the past except the last, which is still running. Use it to rehearse results, printouts and corrections with real judgments in place, while keeping one show open to work on.

6 — All shows judged and moved to the past. Nothing is left running. Awards, CAC and CACIB and best of breed are assigned, every breed is completed and the shows are marked as finished. Use it to rehearse everything that happens after a show.

Working with a set

Everything generated is recognizable. The set name appears in square brackets in front of every show, exhibitor and dog.

People and kennels carry a shorter mark at the end of the name: Foster [t1e3] is exhibitor number three of the set, Foster [t1j5] judge number five, and Green Hill [t1] one of its kennels — which is why the dogs bred there carry it too. The ring accounts of a set are named the same way.

Generated exhibitors can log in. Username and password are both the set name followed by a number, in lower case: for a set called Test1 the first exhibitor is test1e1, the second test1e2, and so on. Give these to whoever is going to practise.

A practice show behaves like a real one. The same rules apply — you cannot close entries with breeds unassigned, you cannot judge before judging starts. That is the point of rehearsing on it.

How it stays separate from real data

Every generated record is marked as belonging to its set. People using the real system do not see it: it does not appear in their lists, their searches, their statistics or their catalogs. The reverse is also true — someone signed in with a practice account sees only their own set, never your real shows.

That mark is also what makes it possible to remove the whole thing later without leaving anything behind.

Emails: nothing to switch on

Practice data does send emails for real — entry confirmations above all, since the generator creates the entries by going through the same process an exhibitor would.

Those emails never reach anyone but you. Any message addressed to a person or an account belonging to a practice set is automatically redirected to the administrator who created that set. There is nothing to switch on, and nothing to remember to switch off afterwards. You will recognize a redirected message immediately: the set name is added in front of the subject, and the body opens with a notice saying which set it came from and who the intended recipient was.

Two consequences worth knowing. Your own address receives one message per confirmation, so a set with many exhibitors fills your inbox — worth keeping in mind before generating a large one. And if the administrator creating the set has no email address of their own, the system refuses to create the set rather than let messages go out to invented addresses.

Test mode for the catalog is a different thing. In Configuration → System, under Tests, there is a switch that sends catalogs and exhibitor documents to yourself instead of to the exhibitors. That one is for rehearsing on a real show. It has nothing to do with practice data and does not need to be on for it.

Removing a set

The panel lists every set you have created, with what it contains: shows, events, rings, persons, breeders, exhibitors, judges, dogs and entries.

Each has a Delete button, and Delete all test sets removes them all at once. You are shown what will be removed and asked to confirm before anything happens. Removal takes out everything the set produced, including the exhibitor and ring accounts, and afterwards the system checks whether anything was left behind — that is what Residuals reports.

Always remove sets from this panel, never by hand in the database. A set touches a dozen different kinds of record, some of them created indirectly, and deleting a show by hand leaves the rest orphaned.

Known limits

Types without certificates award no certificates. If you pick an event type that does not award CAC — a gathering, for instance — the certificates are not offered at the ring, and neither are the junior and veteran ones. Best of breed and the age bests are still awarded, so the breeds complete and the shows finish normally.

Sets left over from an interrupted generation can be removed with the same panel, but the check that reports leftovers does not see every kind of record. If a generation fails halfway, remove the set and check the counts.

Two administrators generating at the same moment will not both succeed: the second gets an error. Generate one set at a time.