HELGA is a software for Orienteering races. It's been progressively developed to its current state since 1997. The interface is multilingual (English, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish).

It supports most Belgian regional and national event types, with special modules for multi day/stage races (2, 3, 4, 5), Score races, Relay events.

But "most Belgian events" will also mean that a lot of features were developed according the Belgian database of the runners, and some specific Belgian rules.

Therefore sometimes in this English help file, you will see an "Belgian feature", without any help or translation.

However, for our foreign users of HELGA, it can be of interest to know the characteristics of the Belgian specifications to identify the runners.  So you will be able transpose some fields to your best convenience for the highest efficiency of the software.

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In Belgium, each runner is first identified by a specific code corresponding to the one of his club + an individual number

My personal example in the Belgian database

  • Code of my club HERMATHENAE in Belgium = 03 (2 or 3 figures in the field but can be increased).
  • My personal ID within my club = 244 ; this number is only unique for my club. (You may imagine another 244 member of another club)

               therefore my full BEL IDentification is 03-244 and it is unique.

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Under each identification (full ID) in the Database, the following  informations must be known


  1. the name and surname
  2. the club (from the first part of the full ID code / relationship Code - Name of the club)
  3. the gender
  4. the year of birth
  5. the nationality
  6. the number of the personal E-card (if any)
  7. for the runners of the northern part of Belgium (VVO), another unique ID code is used (4 figures), independent from the club.
  8. the IOF world ranking ID (if any)


Explanations

1. to 4. are mandatory

N.B. : (3 + 4) will allow to the button of the Configuration screen to update the classes of the runners according the specific IOF distribution.

5. is optional (but necessary for some calculations of results (challenges, championships, and flags)

6. is optional but unique

7. is optional but unique

8. is special, and set by the IOF World ranking classification (unique ID)

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Conclusion : if, in the database of the affiliate runners of your country, one (or more) unique ID fields is (are) present, don't hesitate to use them in one of the available fields.  It will help you to secure all your procedures, mainly the one of the inscriptions to a competition.

As an exemple : the brasilian users of HELGA may replace the so-called "VVO" (nr 7 in the above list) by their CBO nummer of the national confederation.

   

For the runners of the brasilian province of Parana (FPO), another possibility, with use of their CBO and FPO ID's ...


N.B. if you encounter problems with the structure of the fields (number of characters - figures), please let us know


Copyright © <2007 +>,<Robert Marique - Michael Hock>