Discussion: OE database

Warning: geekery ahead.

Splitting off from the event organiser ideas thread, where someone linked to O-Lynx. From that page:

WIFI was used for networking to the main laptop running the OE database, just the same as if using a second laptop with OE.

which reminded me of my long-standing bug-bear about OE, namely the database format behind it.

Has anyone successfully interacted with the OE database format using 3rd-party tools, without needing a copy of OE running to act as a gateway as in the above example? I've looked into this in the past, but always come up against a brick wall where I couldn't work out what the DB format was, and my best guess involved a proprietary API that cost $$$.

All of the OLynx software reads and writes directly to the OE database. It is the only software that I have seen do so successfully, but it still can break on every OE update.
OE is written in delphi, and uses DBISAM for its database. I've been able to open the files and look at the schema with various viewers, but have never made much sense of it. Its also mostly in german.

I would rather see everyone writing software that supported/expanded the IOF XML data exchange standard. Then we wouldn't have to worry about what software each gizmo was intended to work with, they would all just work together (I know that is a very ideal view on how it would work, and realistically the standard would need a lot of work to really be useful, but you have to start somewhere) In the US lots of people use Or, which doesn't even support xml results output, and eventreg only spits out OE csv files, not XML startlists.

+1 IOF XML

I would rather see everyone writing software that supported/expanded the IOF XML data exchange standard.

Oh, I fully agree. If you search AP I'm sure you could find some of my previous XML rants. :) I'm just thinking along the lines of "writing speaker software that doesn't suck" and wondering how this OLynx thing manages to write to the OE database. I would love to write the definitive event software that isn't a steaming pile of kangaroo dung, but there's no time, love or money in it.

And don't even get me started on OE2003, which writes invalid XML files. Who needs </club> tags anyway?

Kangaroo dung has obviously moistened a lot since I last inspected any of it.

Juffy, one of our guys successfully created a software, which read directly from OE database and was showing a big result screen for each runner at the SI readout. Ha had to do some dirty hacking and his solution was in written in Java.

Does anyone have an open source library, preferably in Java, for reading IOF XML. I've done a little bit with it, but it would be nice to have an existing set of routines which I could plug my own validation or reporting routines, for example.

I did a Java program a while back that generated a start list for a reverse chase, where the slowest runners started first. I think I used CSV input for it, though.

Why Java? It doesn't work half the time, and the other half Windows wouldn't let it.