Multiple roster support for teams about leaguerunner

[dave0]

Updated by trawna.com on 2007-03-06T21:41:43

I've been thinking about this, and I think it would be simpler and also more flexible
to simply allow multiple teams with the same name. Then, every year, a new team
could be created (allowing copying from an existing team would be nice). This way,
we also support teams that change their names, colours, geographical preferences,
etc. over time.

The only database change that I see being required for this is removing the 'unique'
flag from the teamname. We'd presumably want to add some code to make sure there are
not two teams in the same league with the same name, but that's easy.

Am I missing a downside here? The only drawback I see is that there's no way to
easily track a team's evolution through the years, although that could maybe be
solved with a "previous_team_id" field that would be set when you copy a team.

[dave0]

Updated by dave0000 on 2007-03-06T22:33:32

Yeah, there are a lot of downsides:

• impossible to uniquely identify a team by name alone.
• schedule and standings would need to show extra data to allow
  differentiation of same-named teams
• possible confusion if two teams with the same name exist in the same
  (or in overlapping) leagues or divisions. Eg: "Hey, can you sub for
  us tonight? We're 'The Leafs' -- check Leaguerunner for our gametime".
• explosion of number of teams in db (OCUA would end up adding 350 new
  team records per year, for example) will make a lot of things, like
  searching, more cumbersome.
• need a way to freeze old teams but keep them around to show the
  evolution of the team along the way.

[dave0]

Updated by trawna.com on 2007-03-06T22:52:42

I did say that we wouldn't allow two teams with the same name in the same league, but
forgot that there can be multiple leagues on a particular night. I think it would be
possible to do a query for existing teams with the same name on the same night of the
same season and same year? This would allow us to block name changes that would
cause this confusion. It couldn't catch situations like "The Leafs" and "Leafs" both
existing, but the code currently allows that anyway.

There would be a lot more teams in the db, but we'd change the existing queries to
only look at active teams (see my notes on issue 5), so that users and admins would
see the same as they do now, and those historical teams would only be visible if you
followed a new link to the archive area.

[dave0]

Updated by trawna.com on 2008-03-26T19:28:05

Version 2.6 implements the changes as I described in my earlier comment. If this is
considered an acceptable solution, this can be marked as Fixed.

Original ticket set status to Started (we converted to open)