Masterpoint Awards File Formats

Most scoring programs used in Australia produce award files in the required format. The following information can be used by developers and also by any clubs who are producing their award files by hand.

Note for developers: When creating award files, it is preferred that you onlyu have on line per player, as opponsed to one line per player per session. Files with multiple lines per player are consolidated to one record per player when uploaded, but the web site uploading and parsing processes are slower for larger files, so smaller files will make the process quicker for your user.

It is important to remember that award files must be in plain text (ASCII) format. That mean that if you are using Microsoft Word or Excel or any other such program, you must select the Save As function and save it as a ASCII text file, rather that the Save function which will save the file in its native format. Files with a .DOC or .XLS extension cannot be processed. If you must use a standard Windows program, use Notepad. A better solution is our free NAT4WIN program - this offers you a convenient method for entering the points, while it automatically creates a proper masterpoint file, ready to upload. It is available from our Downloads page. A full description of the functions and their uses are available in the NATIONAL help file.

Naming the Files

Files containing masterpoints can be any name, but the extension (those 3 letters after the dot in the file name) determines what colour masterpoints are in the file.

Green point only: .grn
Red point only: .red
Gold points: .gld
Green and red point in the one file: .rag

The old extensions are also recognised by the new system, namely .mp1 to .mp6.

Structure of files

RAG files (containing both red and green points in the one file)
Position 1-7: ABF Number (right-aligned, zero padded)
Positions 8-13: Number of red points (right-aligned, zero padded)
Positions 14-19: Number of green points (right-aligned, zero padded)

Example

All other award files (GRN, RED, GLD and others)
Position 1-7: ABF Number (right-aligned, zero padded)
Positions 8-13: Number of masterpoints (right-aligned, zero padded)

Example

(The colours in the above examples are for illustration only - they will not appear like that in the actual file.

In other words, either 13 or 19 digits per line precisely. No other characters, no spaces and no signs. Just the 13-digits made up of two ot three individual sets of digits representing the ABF number (7-digits) and the awards (6-digits). We work with whole number only, therefore the last 2-digits of the awards are assumed to be the decimal part. Each item of data must be left-pack with zeroes (0). For example, ABF number 123 becomes 0000123 and 0.53 points should read 000053 etc. Thus, in the example above, ABF number 123456 receives 0.42 points, 2288 gets 0.07 and 88249 gets 1.45 points.

Note that when making RAG files (containing both red and green points), it is important that the points are in the correct order, i.e. red comes before green. Note that in the example above, the second line contains no green points and the third line contains no red points.

Congress, State and National Files

Finally, those of you who need to create congress, state and national type files are identical to the club files. The file name is unimportant, but the correct extension is crucial.