Categories

Categories can be assigned to participants, in order to provide a secondary ranking information. They're quite often - but not limited to - age groups.

Dictionary

Participant categories can be edited or imported as brute values. In most situations it's however recommended to have them listed in the categories table of the event.

Among the properties of a category are its abbreviation and its label. The abbreviation (or code) is the value that will appear in the main grids, as well as what can be imported with a participant list.

You can also set a category as inactive if you want it to be ignored in case of automatic assignment, without deleting it.

Age groups and other categories

You can mix some categories not related to age at the same level than age groups. For example a "Disabled" or "Tandem" category.

The simple rule in this case is that if a participant is manually assigned to one of these categories, then it won't be overwritten when a global age group calculation is performed.

Predefined category sets

At the event creation the fastest way to get started is to select a sport and then the governing body framing it.

If this governing body is listed in the wizard, then there's a good chance there is already an up-to-date listing of the official age groups in use coming with it. The case happening your event file will be automatically initialized with the right set. If it's not, feel free to forward us the details and we'll add your local federations and categories as part of Wiclax delivery.

On the event category settings, you can then work on the list in many ways:

• retrieving the predefined sets for governing bodies

• using the "Create from participant data" menu, in case your participant list has been imported with some category values and the category list is empty

• using the "Paste" menu, if your list comes from a random format (Excel, text, ...)

• importing a list from another Wiclax event file

• saving and reloading your own reusable lists

Automatic assignment

Automatic category assignment to participants mainly refers to their age group calculation. It relies on their gender and date of birth (sometimes only the year). The calculation happens when entering a new participant, after importing a list of participants, or on demand for all of them if you've made some changes to the dictionary for example.

Here are the rules to consider:

• Gender, min age and max age serve as the basis information for calculation. Gender is optional, either because your event is not mixed, or because the same age group label is used for both men and women.

• on the bottom of the list, you will indicate what is the reference date for the age calculation. It can be a fixed date or it can be relative to the event date. Most of the time the sport season is aligned with the calendar year, but it can happen that the change is made on Sept. 1st for example.

The age calculation mode (season or event date) can be adjusted row by row if you're in a complex case. Most of the time you can simply let it as is.

Super age groups

Some "super" age groups can be defined, meaning they're a grouping of other more detailed groups. Like on this example:

They're displayed underscored on the list. Such categories are not directly assigned to participants. Instead a Masters 5 competitor for example will be presented with a rank in his category and also in the overall Masters group.

Categories by race

In rare cases, it can happen that your event mixes some races having a different requirement in terms of categories. For example a running race and a cycling race belonging to their respective federations.

To handle that, the list can aggregate multiple sets, and on each row you can specify which race(s) it applies to:

Level groups

Level groups are an independent list of categories for individuals. They can be whatever you need for ranking purposes, but they're not age groups. So a participant can belong to an age group and at the same time to a level group. Podiums are populated with the 2 kinds of categories if they're in use.

Team categories

Team categories are also an independent set. As their name says you can use them to rank teams in different groups. Some automatic assignment rules can be specified on the same screen.

Podiums

The layout order for podiums is by default following the order of categories in the dictionary. You can freely modify it by drag and drop operations on the podium list.

If the situation requires it, you can ask the podiums to be calculated on the basis of a different category set than those currently in the dictionary (and assigned to participants). This can be done through this menu, which is listing data saved in the "My categories" list: