Pulling FIRST Data

[compsuppjk]

As far as I know, there are only three main sources from which you get data.

The first would be the twitter handle @FRCFMS, which is posted to by each individual event server as the matches are played. I would never solely use this data, because if an event is having an issue with the internet at their venue, you will never be able to get this data again (nobody goes back and creates those twitter posts).

The second source of data would be the event data posted in HTML format found through the FRC website (example: http://www2.usfirst.org/2014comp/Eve...hresults.html). Because these use the standard event codes in the URLs, you can programatically scrape these pages. You can find the match results and all of the rank data this way, and they should be updated every time a new match score is committed. In my mind, this is the best way to obtain data, as these HTML files will generally be posted after an event, even if there was an issue with the internet at the venue.

The third source of data pertains to your question about team information. This is unfortunately where it gets tricky (perhaps there's a better way to do this, but I'm not aware of one.) If you go to an event's page on the FRC website, there is a link "What teams are registered for this event?". If you open that in a new tab, you get something that looks like this: https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index....5BB4Gjoq14A824 . You can individually click on teams in that list to get their TIMS data; perhaps this format is OK for what you're doing, as you'd be looking for data on teams by event. You could also script something to query all of the events and compile the data that way. The only other thing I could think of to do would be to iterate through the last value on this link: https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index....ls&tpid=211505 until you grab all of the data (unfortunately that record number doesn't seem to correspond with team numbers in any way).

I hope this helps.