In most races, you would use the standard tools within the race timing side of the Zone4 software to assign Bibs and GoChips. But there are some situations where it may be advantageous to do so in the registration. One such example is perhaps where you want to assign GoChips for a whole series of races and so that data needs to reside in the registration that then feeds into each race. This document describes the process to assign Bibs and Chips in a registration.
Firstly you must add fields to your registration to hold your bib and GoChip values. Use your form builder to add a number field for “bib” and a text field for “chip”.
You’ll probably want these fields to be set to “Only display to signed-in administrator” so they aren’t visible on the public side of the registration form.
Then create a new Report on the report side of the registration where the right most column is your you bib or chip field. If you are assigning both, you would want two reports or to modify your one report once you have assigned the first set of values. You can include whatever fields, sorting and groupings, and filters you want on the report, the key thing to understand is that the system is going to fill in the right most column sequentially top to bottom so you want to configure your report in order to get the bib/chip assignment you want.
Once you’ve got the report looking the way you want click … menu in the upper right and click “Assign Bibs”.
This dialog is the same for assigning bibs or GoChips. In the example below, we are assigning GoChips. In this simple example, we are starting at bib 1, and using the B rack only. Click Assign Bibs to assign the values requested.
The system will go down your report and fill in the right most column with the sequential values. Note that is only fills in BLANK fields and will not over-write values already in the right most column. In the example below, I manually inserted A99 before clicking the button and it skipped over the value assigning the sequence. This makes the tool less dangerous that if it overwrote values. If you need to clear the column to redo something, use the “Empty Rightmost Column” button – this DOES erase everything in that column though.
Once you’ve got your Bibs right, you can change reports or modify your report and repeat the process for GoChips. Both are not necessarily needed so it’s up to you how you want to use the tool.
The final piece of this process is that when you create your race, you have to map these custom fields from your registration into the special fields they occupy in the race file. This happens at Step 5 of the race creation process “Categories & Fields”. Click the link that says “Click here to modify standard race fields.”
If you added a “bib” field to your registation, check the checkbox for “There is a Racer Number field on the registration form” and then select that bib field from the drop down. In the example below, only the chips were pre-assigned in the registration so the checkbox for “There is a Timing Chip field on the registration form” was selected and the “chip” field from the registration was selected.
That completes the process for assigning bibs and chips in the registration form instead of the race.