BRAVE SOUL WANTED 4.0.0.19 build is ready.
There was a substantial change to the way that wager tags are handled internally. This was done to provide you with more wager tags without disrupting people's current settings databases too much. While I have tested this code myself, I get woozy over big changes. If someone is brave, it would be nice if they tried this out and posted back how things went. I don't anticipate problems, but I'm just one guy with a keyboard.
The Changes:

* Wager Tags
Here's what happened to give you up to 249 wager tags:
A) When you first start this version (AND ANY AFTER IT) it will look to see if your settings db stores wager tags in the "old" way. If it does, then it loads the wager tags from the wagertags table. It then proceeds to DELETE the wager tags table. It then recreates this table using a new format. When you shut down EquiSim it will then write out your existing wager tags. Bottom line, you get 249 wager tag slots and you don't lose any of your existing wager tags.
B) Wait, 249 wager tags? Does that mean I have to scroll through 249 items to select a tag, ugh?!? No, not necessarily. If you do not create a wager tag, it won't show up in the drop list. There is a special key word called "no tag". Any tagged named "no tag" does NOT show up in the wager tag drop lists used to assign tags.

* Logically combining wager tags in the Wager Analysis Report. You can now "AND" or "OR" wager tags together in the wager analysis controls. The updated user's guide describes this as such:
Note that the Tags that you optionally applied to your wagers can be combined using the "AND" or the "OR" operator. The drop list that says "And Tags" and "Or Tags" controls this. When you "And" tags that means that the wagers returned by your analysis must contain ALL of the tags that you select (up to the maximum of three. When you "Or" tags that means that the wagers returned in your query must contain at least one of the tags that you select out of the possible three assigned to any given wager.
Note that you do not need to apply the tags in the same order that you assigned them when you created the wager. For example, say that you assigned a tag you created called "good trainer" to the first slot in a wager. You could do analysis and have the third slot in the wager controls dialog set to your "good trainer" tag and this would pick up the "good trainer" tag assigned to the example wager -- it does not matter which slot the tags are in.

** WAGER MACROS. Existing Wager Macros (and only Wager Macros) no longer are compatible. Sorry. The first time you go to the Wager ANalysis view it will tell you that the version of the macro file is incorrect, and ask you if you want to delete it so that ES will recreate it. Just accept it and mutter nasty things about me under your breath (at least I didn't make you manually delete the file...)

****
Evil Bug having to do with Profiler Values using the results of the race being profiled as part of the profile....
When storing to the database there is an option to store profiler values. This requires that races are profiled. At the time races are stored to DB results need to be present. When results are present there was a darn good chance that the results for the very race being profiled would end up in the race's profile. THIS IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE AT ANY TIME. Now when you profile a race EquiSim does NOT include stats from any races that occurred on the same day as the race being profiled. Period. This prevents the problem described above. In fact, it pretty much completely eliminates "back fitted" data, except that you can still get into "trouble" by doing a profile of a race that can include data from future races.

[This message was edited by Nathan M. on November 11, 2003 at 11:21 PM.]

Hmm, I haven't been doing this storing profiler stuff. It kinda escaped me. Should I be storing this too along with results to DB?

Chuck,

The one and only reason to "store profiler values" is that it allows you to use the SPAT to find out how well the various profiler values (in 4.0 there are now, what, five of them?) perform statistically -- just like the way you can find out how well the simulation winner (and 2nd place, and third place, etc) horse does.

There are two downsides:
A) It takes much longer to store races to db (relatively speaking) because each race needs to be profiled right before it is stored.

B) The various and sundry things to watch out for so that you don't mess up those statistics for how well the profiler values do (double storing, storing races out of chronological order, etc.). The program has what I think are the necessary features now to make this task easy/straightforward, but I'm sure it will have/need more in the future too (don't let that scare you from storing profiler values if this information appeals to you - it really ain't hard once you've done it once or twice).