Collections
Renamed from Accumulators, and friend of Smorgasbord
Collections are hold areas where a user can place deals and recipes, then continue loading or generating more deals and recipes elsewhere in the program without disturbing the ones already in the Collection.
This makes it possible to load or create several different sets of things during a session, while selectively collecting only the ones you intend to keep together—most typically by eventually saving them to a file.
There are three ways to store things in collections.
Click the “Collect” buttons
Click the “+ Deals” button to store deals from the last deal generate or individual file load operation in the deal collection. The deal filter is in effect and will determine which deals make it into the collection.
Click the “+ Recipes” button to store the current recipe from the Recipe Maker panel in the recipe collection. The current deal shaper is stored along with the recipe, so make sure they are a good working pair before saving the recipe.
Click the “+ Both” button to store deals and recipes. When you use this button, the program assumes you want the deals and recipes to match up one-for-one, so it stores one recipe per deal, even if it is storing the same recipe every time. This makes it so that, if you click this button multiple times with different sets of deals and recipes, the related deals and recipes stored in the two collections will appear together later on if you save the whole schmear to a navigator file. The “+ Both” is also invoked internally if you use the ‘Gator function to read in a smorgasbord (deal collection) file, since you will likely want the resulting deals and recipes to match up if you make a navigator post-’Gator.
Load a single deal file with the ‘Gator option “on”
The ‘Gator, or variegator, provides a quick way to pump out four deals, nicely varied, for each deal input from an individual deal file. The deals the ‘Gator produces are stored in the deal collection, from where you can eventually save them to a file.
Load a single smorgasbord file with the ‘Gator option “on”
When you load a .bcoasmorgasbord file with the ‘Gator option “on,” the generator will, for each recipe in the file, generate four deals. It will turn on dealer rotation and vulnerability rotation, and it will set hands to rotate 90 degrees after each board. It will number output deals consecutively from 1, maintaining correct board/dealer/vulnerability combinations throughout.
So, for instance, if you have a smorgasbord file with four different recipes, ‘Gator will produce 16 deals, four for each recipe, nicely rotated so that all four seats at a table will get the key cards once for each deal. The deals and the recipes that produced them are stored in the deal and recipe collection, from which you can do other things with them such as save the deals to PBN, LIN, or Navigator files. You probably wouldn’t need to save off the deal collection into a new output smorgasbord file, since you already had them in your input smorgasbord file.
Load all recipe files or LIN deals files from a folder to collections
This panel and button near the upper right is separate from the individual file load panel and button. This one requires you to select a folder, not an individual file. Once you select it, the generator will load deals from all LIN files in the folder and its subfolders into the deal collection. It will load recipes from all .bcoarecipe files into the recipe collection.
The deal filter is in effect during the folder load operation.
There are two ways to empty out the collections without writing them to files: reload your browser page, or click the “Clear” button to the right of each “Collect” button.
Once you have a collection that you like, you can save it to a file. File save options are covered here.