Deal Generator User Guide

Deal Filter

This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.

The Collections panel and the File Saver panel are also shown here because the deal filter exists to control what goes into the deal collection and the deal file. The deal filter is or is not in effect depending on other things you are doing with the deal generator. This can be hard to keep track of in your head, so there’s an easy way to find out if some planned action is impacted by the filer: just move your mouse pointer over the button you want to use, and the deal filter panel will change color.

Here, I have moved my cursor over the “LIN” button in the File Saver panel. You can see the color change in the deal filter panel:

This tells me that if I click the LIN button, the deal filter will determine which deals are saved to the LIN file. With the default settings shown above, all deals would be written.

Note that if I move my mouse pointer over the “Collect Deals” button, the deal filter panel is in effect for determining which deals go into the deal collection, too:

After I click the “Collect Deals” button, the counter next to it shows that I have something in the deal collection. And now, the deal filter is only active for controlling what goes into the deal collection; it no longer filters deals going into deal files. Here I move my mouse pointer over the “PBN Coll.” button (which is now set to save deals from the deal collection, and the deal filter does not change color:

But the deal filter is still active for input to the deal collection:

The deal filter is also in effect when you load deals from all LIN files in a folder. That’s because that kind of file input goes directly into the deal collection by default, not into the place where newly-generated deals go. This is because the assumption is that if you are loading all deals from a folder, you are doing some mass operation and you want to be selective. Since filters control what goes into the deal collection but not what comes out of it, you will need to set up your deal filter to tame the input before loading all deal files from a folder.

In the above image, I have set up a deal filter to narrow down the types of deals I want, and then I moved my mouse pointer over the “Browse” button of the load-all-files-from-folder panel. The deal filter panel goes green, showing it would be in effect if I were to select a folder full of deal files.

The deal filter has four settings.

Match Type specifies exact matching, or “like” matching, on the deal’s board number. Exact matching is self-explanatory. “Like” matching matches the board number or numbers selected from the second dropdown not with the exact board number from the deal it is trying to match, but with the remainder of dividing that board number by 64 (aka modulo 64). The use of the number 64 is explained in another post.

The board number dropdown of the deal filter lets you select a board number, set of board numbers, or a range of board numbers to include. The selections were designed to cover the situations that a teacher or student might want to see most often, and are more easily understood if you study the blog post and 64-board map linked from that post and also on the deal filter panel itself.

The “From” dropdown lets you specify that filtering should start either from the start of each input file or the start of your generated deal list, or else from a random location in those inputs. The “random” selection is truly random, and it does not attempt to preserve any meaningful grouping of deals.

The “For” setting lets you specify how many matching deals to include, once matching has begun (either from the top or from a random location). Just as “From” controls the starting point for each input file if there are multiple files loaded from a folder, “For” controls the output record count for each file.

There are so few “For” options because I envision the user wanting to get a deal or deals suitable either for solo study, study with one partner, or study with a group of 4 people. Or one person could want 2 or 4 of some type of deal for purposes of studying variations on a theme. If you have saved off several files, each containing many deals with a scenario unique to that file, you can use the “Add all from folder” panel, and a filter, to rapidly pull out however many deals you need from those files for your study session.