Reading the TablePress datastore

Yikes! That previous post formatted a bit differently from what I expected. Let’s try again.

Greetings,

I run a high school baseball site (a shared interest?) that uses and displays lots of data in tablular formats. So TablePress has a been a real boon, since so much of what is presented is best done with tables.

Consider schedules. The coach hands me a table with dates, times, and locations (and small amounts of incidental data like whether the game is a scrimmage or a ‘divisional’ game). I import this to a TablePress table, and add columns for Runs (for and against), Hits, and Errors. This TABLE becomes my default data-store.

When a game is played, a site administrator (usually me) goes to the table-row for this game, and adds values into the Runs, Hits, and Errors table entries for this row. Example: Varsity Schedules

But what I would LIKE to be able to do is programatically crawl though this data, adding up cumulative wins, losses, hits, and errors; and comparing the present date to the game date in order to present imminent games, recently played games, etc. (perhaps to populate yet another table.) In understand I may be able to do the sums with your extensions, but how do I accomplish the comparison of dates?

My point is that if the data is a table, whether it is stored in mySql or in TablePress; I will ALWAYS want to display it via TablePress.

So what I really would like — is to be able to read the values of my TablePress table data from my custom PHP code; then do some comparisons and producing some new short-code values (this looks straightforward); then I can use these short-codes to populate another table (ex: a Cumlative Stats table like those shown at:Anderson Baseball. I can take a whack at writing a little plug-in to do all this; but why should I reproduce all the brilliant code you’ve ALREADY written to present my data? I’d only get it wrong several times before I got it right. I want to leverage what you’ve already done to present my data as a table!

Putting all this tabular data in yet another data-store also seems redundant to me, since you’ve already stored all this SAME DATA somewhere in your own database tables. My experience with multiple data-stores is that they tend to become un-synchronized, and inevitably lead to row integrity conflicts. And again, you’ve already done such a good job of it — I’d only get it wrong again several times before I finally reproduce all the storage and retrieval mechanics that you have already accomplished so well.

Best,
-Matt

Tobias,

You are awesome! This is exactly the kind of detail I’m looking for, and thanks for the pointers to the specific code sections — you’ve saved me hours and hours of spelunking! I’m off to code…

-Matt