Nathan, I've been reading the documentation and this looks like a powerful tool. The question I have is, supposing I want to create four columns: E1,E2,E2+Late and Late. Could I retrieve the information by entering $pr*E1 and have it bring up whatever the horse's rating is (dom,best,etc.)? And if that is the case could I then have it toggle another column for the jockey's win % for that particular strength?

Bill,

You won't be able to get quite that fancy in the first release. But you can do what you are asking for with a little imagination.

Here's a way to determine what type of E1 ability a horse has. The complexity comes from the fact that a horse can have more than one E1 ability (a DOME1 horse also has BestE1 and StrongE1).

You'd have a "horse style" formula view -- each row would represent a horse. You could do this with a Past Perf style view as well, where each row represented a past performance.

First, the hz prefix means "has". so hzBestE1 will return 1 if the horse has BestE1, or zero if not. With this knowledge in hand this expression can be used to "numerize" the ability in question:

($hzDomE1 * 4) + ($hzBestE1 * 3) + ($hzStrongE1 *2 ) + ($hzWeakE1 * 1)

So, if the horse has DomE1 the horse would have a score of 9:
(1 * 4) + (1 * 3) + (1 * 2) + (0 * 1) = 9
If he has BestE1 he would get a 5:
(0 * 4) + (1 * 3) + (1 * 2) + (0 * 1) = 5
StrongE1 would be a 2:
(0 * 4) + (0 * 3) + (1 * 2) + (0 * 1) = 2
and WeakE1 would be a 1:
(0 * 4) + (0 * 3) + (0 * 2) + (1 * 1) = 1

You'd have to familiarize yourself with the numbering schema that you choose, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

For the jockey win%, in one column, you could do something like this:

($hzDomE1 * $jkDomE1_WP) + (LESSER($hzDomE1, 1) * $hzBestE1 * $jkBestE1_WP) +....

This is much like the expression used to characterize the type of E1 ability the horse has. BUT - since you may only want to get at ONE win% for a type of ability, we use the "LESSER" function to ZERO out the BestE1 score should the horse have the DomeE1 ability. That is, the first part says:

"Hey, if this horse has the DomE1, get the jockey's win% for DomE1 and multiply it by '1'. Otherwise, zero it out by multiplying it by Zero." As an expression, simply: $hzDomE1 * $jkDomE1_WP

Then the expression says to add the results of the first part to the next part, which covers the case of _BEST_E1. Here it says:

(LESSER($hzDomE1, 1) * $hzBestE1 * $jkBestE1_WP)

"Look, if this guy HAS the DOME1, we don't care about the BestE1. If this is the case, multiply whatever we get back from $jkBestE1_WP by ZERO. That's what the LESSER function does for us. Otherwise, if he does NOT have DomE1, we'll get the $jkBestE1_WP value and multiply it by 1 or 0, depending on whether or not the horse has the BestE1 ability".

Thanks Nathan, That will work fine.

Bill