Deal Generator User Guide

Tutorial: copying and merging shaper tabs within a recipe

This tutorial shows you how to use the Copy and Merge buttons in the upper left corner of each Shaper Tab:

This feature is provided because, quite often when developing recipes, you will want to propagate settings from one shaper tab to one or more other shaper tabs.

To use the feature, first select a “from” shaper tab from the dropdown. Here, I have selected to copy or merge settings from Shaper Tab 6:

Then click either the Copy button or the Merge button.

Copy will overlay your current shaper tab with the settings of the selected “from” shaper tab.

Merge will only apply non-default settings of the selected “from” shaper tab. For instance, if no shapes are selected on the “from” shaper tab, then no shapes will be merged into the current shaper tab. If HCP range of the “from” tab is 0 to 37, then HCP will not be merged. Default Cntl and LTC ranges of 0 to 12 will not be merged.

Let’s try an example.

Suppose I want to make a recipe for a 1-level spade opener in North. One way to specify this is with multiple shape selections: Spades Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. There are, of course, many other ways to specify a 1-spade opener—this is just one possibility that might be used in a simple instructional recipe.

Suppose also that I will eventually want to specify different HCP ranges for that same set of shapes, all within one recipe. You do that by defining multiple shaper tabs in one recipe. Each shaper tab may start with the same settings (if you so choose), but then you can vary things like HCP range, make additional shape selections in one tab but not the others, etc.

So, we’re going to make a multiple-shaper-tab recipe in which we will want to copy or merge settings from one shaper tab to one or more others.

Here’s Shaper Tab 1 with the desired shapes in North. You can’t see them all at once in the shape drop-down, but you can see them listed in the Shaper Selections text area:

Notice that the number “1” for Shaper Tab 1 is bold print and italic. That means that the shaper tab is in effect for generating a recipe. Actually, Shaper Tab 1 is always in effect, even if it has all default values. But tabs 2-11 are only in effect if they have non-default values. Notice that none of the other shaper tab numbers are bold and italic.

Now click the tab number for Shaper Tab 2. You will know you are on Shaper Tab 2 because you should see it’s name in the upper left of the tab, and the tab number above it is highlighted (or low-lighted, depending on your browser):

We want to copy the settings from Shaper Tab 1 to 2. The Shaper dropdown already has “1” selected, so all we have to do is click the Copy button, to get this:

The North hand doesn’t look different in the shaper tab because all the selected shapes are somewhere down the list, out of sight. However, the Shaper Selections text area has conveniently scrolled down to show you the settings of the current tab, and there you see the three shapes that were copied from Tab 1 to Tab 2. Also, the tab number above Shaper Tab 2 is now bold and italic because that shaper tab has non-default values.

Now let’s try a merge.

Here, I have moved to Shaper Tab 3 by clicking its number above the shaper tabs. Then I selected “Balanced” shape in North:

For this shaper tab, we want to merge in the settings from Shaper Tab 1, but we don’t want to lose our Balanced setting. With Tab 1 selected from the dropdown list, click the Merge button to get this:

In the Shaper Selections area, you can see that North in Shaper Tab 3 still has the Balanced shape selected, plus now it has the other shape selections from Shaper Tab 1.