Hey everyone, I've stepped away from MFN but have finally gotten around to updating my game log download tool and uploading it on Github. I'll admit, I have only tried to get it to double click and run on one other computer however it seems to be working fine with a fresh install of Java, the programming language.



How does it work?

The tool when launched asks for five pieces of information. The download path, which is the folder where the game logs will be stored in. You can find the folder you want, right click it, and click copy as path and paste this data into the download path textbox. The apostrophes and slashes do not need to be messed with. Secondly, it asks for the league URL. This is the URL from the league home page, where you see players of the week and standings, for the league you want to download game logs from. There is an example already posted upon launch that is the URL from the USFL league. Third is the box score number which is where the tool starts from. You need to go into the schedule tab, navigate to the preseason of the your starting year, and find the lowest box score number listed for the first week of the preseason. The current UI does not list these numbers in order anymore it seems. If you are unsure of what I'm talking about, go to the schedule and hover your mouse over the box score buttons for the games. In the bottom left of your screen you will see a URL preview for that box score and the last four to five numbers will be your box score number. You can also go to each box score individually by clicking the buttons and recording the last digits in the URL displayed, but that is more tedious. The default number currently is for the preseason of 2005 in USFL. Fourth is the number of seasons which is how many seasons worth of game logs to download. The tool is currently not built to handle non-completed seasons so it can not be used for season's where the championship game has not been played yet. Our default number is 1 which will download all regular season games for 2005 and post season games for 2005. The fifth and last bit of information needed is the number of preseason games. The tool does not download preseason games because I didn't think they would be useful. If you put the wrong number, the tool will not accurately download a season's worth of game logs. The tool takes this information to then download each regular and post season game log and save them as .csv file types. These can be opened with Microsoft Excel or other free options. From my testing the tool takes about 10 minutes to download a season's worth of games but your own equipment and internet will differ from mine which may cause the tool to be slower or quicker than that.



What Doesn't It Do?

It will not provide any kind of statistical analysis on the game logs you download. At this point it's less about a competitive advantage and more so that I don't want to convert another script to have a GUI interface to be used by other people. Namely the code will be ugly and I would rather practice other skills by creating a website to host the data and display it instead.



What You Need for It to Work

1. A device capable of downloading and installing the latest version of Java

2. Internet

3. To download the leagueScraper1.0.jar file from https://github.com/SamCasto/personal_Projects/tree/main/leagueScraper. Click the file name, then look to the right side of the screen where three dots in a horizontal line are, click those then click download to get the file from Github.

4. After installing Java, you should be able to double click the jar file to run it like any program on Windows and from there, feed the tool the information specific to the league you want to download game logs from and click the Start button. The files will be renamed to be a little gibberish using the first couple letters of the league name and adding numbers to the box score so if you want your game logs easy to track, probably not the tool for you.



There will be some feedback from the tool if the data you entered for some reason does not work with the name of the item flashing red for incorrect. It is very simple validation currently so there is likely a typo somewhere. After clicking start and the tool is working, it will popup a little box to inform you it has started. It will also popup a little box to inform you when it is finished however you should be able to see the progress by navigating to the folder you are downloading the logs to. I don't believe these popups override anything meaning if you are doing something else on your computer, you won't notice them. Not sure how to do that so if anyone knows how, if you could DM me I would appreciate it.



The code is also right there in the link if you want to verify I am not giving you malware or some other virus. I wish I was that good at coding. If you have any questions about the tool, post them here and I will try to answer ASAP. If you have any questions about installing JAVA, please google it as that will get you much more informative and qualified answers than what I can do. I'm going to link a page to installing it and that's it. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/download-install-java-windows-linux-macos/