FEATURE: Quality of Life improvements

[YouFoundJK]

In case you are still working on it, I have some quality of life comments to make:

1. Selecting the player names makes the window resize everytime which is mildly annoying.
2. Maybe have an option to import player (.csv etc) details without having to go through could be useful.
3. Its probably hard to implement, but having 'loading previous state' feature could be very useful:
   (1) restoring any previous state during auction (advanced version of the current undo feature)
   (2) You can look up the entire history at a later point in time, in case of arguments etc.
   (3) stop and resume auction at a later point in time.
   You could potentially do this by caching each new state change (probably in a json format) and load/write to it (git does an exceptional job at this, it can even caches undo stats- you could look it up for implementation ideas).
4. Use keybinding to do various things. Eg: 'ctrl+z` would be undo.
5. Generalize it to n team auctions instead of 4.
6. Compiling and Releasing a standalong binary of the production code could possibly attract a lot more users.
   Anyways, I wont be using this, its just some ideas that came to my mind, so feel free to ignore these suggestions.

[MANASMIT]

1: It is easy to implement will do that, so it doesnt resize.
2: I was thinking of making it a standalone app type(.exe) where the 1st page would ask for players list and price.
3.1: I am using stack to keep record of all bid history and undo just pops the latest instance and shows the 2nd latest instance which is the previous one. But I dont know how to display all the states and choose the appropriate state to revert back to.
3.2: I can do this but I dont know how to display/show.
3.3: I am not well versed with git but lets see.
4: EASILY doable
5: Most of my GUI placements and width is dependent on 4 teams, generalizing to n teams might break the GUI, or might lead to weird placements.
6: I was actually planning on this.
And thanks brother for the suggestions.

[YouFoundJK]

Sure your welcome.

5. That is true. Perhaps you could think of a different layout, maybe just show the manager names (say on left bar) and clicking that will show the players they currently hold (in the middle of screen), player list for aution (on right), etc. Maybe you could keep the layout that you have if their are only 4 but if there are more, you could switch to a different more compact one.
6. I thinks its not very hard to do it. Consider a cache file of this format:

Possible blueprint for .caching state implementation

GOAL: Should log all auction process and be able to reproduce the current state of affairs, ideally with least amount of effort.

The cache file could look like this -

Header:

Initial block (1 or more lines) that encode the constant parameters of the auction. This includes

• Auction Name (date, time, etc...)
• Total number of managers, their names (other details like path to logo.png), total initial money
• Total no of players, their names, base bid value, ...
• COMMENT: You can assign unique ids to managers (say int 1-100) and players (say int 101-1000) here, so that this may be later used in the state logger (below) to conveniently track them.

State logger:

This should ideally be very concise and log only the variable parameters. Should log any and all changes that happen in the auction process (eg: Mananger bids, Player bought, etc) and should be easy to parse through.

This should log the following parameters (atleast all I could think of right now), note everything below is for the current round:

• Current amount available to each manager.
• Current players that each manager holds and the price that player was bougth for.
• Which player BID for what amount by which manager in the current round.
• Which player BOUGHT for what amount by which manager in the current round.

Knowing all such state logs until now I believe you can exactly reconstruct the current state of affairs starting from the 'Header'. A sample state logger data could look like this:

Example

1. I think its possible to do in a very compact way with just a single string (eg: 1M750V101P35V103P75V212P90V...,2M800V...,3M... could be interpreted - 1M as Manager with unique id '1'; 750rup as 750/- left right now; 101P35V as Player with unique id 101 was auctioned at 35/-; 103P75V ... and so on), but will have to think about it more. You will have to find a nice format for this, also add bid data, maybe add bid increment (on how much the bid should increment in next round - in case increment is not predefined). Main advantage is just this single string will tell you the current state of affairs (you wont have to parse the lines before it unless you require an undo or you are in a special situation, say, case where you want to know all the unsuccessful bids by a specific manager until now for whatever reason, in which case you will have to parse though all the lines).
2. Or you could be very naive and do the same thing in multiple lines and say only what happened in this instance like so

   Manager 1 bid player 45 for 75
   Manager 5 bid player 45 for 80
   Manager 3 bid player 45 for 85
   Manager 3 bought player 45 for 85
   

   Obviously will have to convert this to more optimised form like '1M45bid75' for 1st line and so on. Disadvantage of this is that to get the current state you will have to walk though all the previous lines starting from Header.

---

Finally you will have to store this in some format (maybe .json since json has very efficient parsing libraries available, or just as a custom txt file with your own custom format), and implement a way to retrive this info (when required) and log the the current state (optionally for efficiency do this in background maybe using multithreading or multiprocessing - probably an overkill for this specific usecase so should be least of your priority).

• Also its a good idea to go through the web for autioning tools, maybe someone already has all these (and other features) implemented that you could just copy paste.

Hope this is somehow useful! If you ever plan to implement it, I'll be happy to know how you implemented it.

[YouFoundJK]

Hey Manasmit, I got bored today so I think I implemented most of this and some more.

• Mostly rewrote the architecture and made it more modular.
• Now uses .csv files instead of excel (open source is better)
• All libraries are I believe comes with python installation.
• Some aesthetics improvements.

Here is the files: auction_v1.4.zip

To run

1. python auction_engine.py -t will generate the template .csv file for input
2. and then python auction_UI.py runs the UI.