Best way to control form parameters.

[hargi]

I am currently planning on making a team entry app. Just looking for the best programming way of doing this.
So currently the competition secretary emails all the club captains with a excel spreadsheet with 8 slots on for them to enter their players, when he gets this back he turns it into a start sheet with in excel. However theres lots of problems with people not having excel and just not doing it correct. Also the competition has grown so there's now lots of teams and leagues.

So the solution is to make a online form that they enter the details in, we already have a website where I publish the results on.
The hierarchy is League > Zone > Fixture (so each zone has different fixtures to others)
One of the requierments is to make the form only available in a set time period 2 weeks before the fixture.
Im planning on doing this in Ruby on Rails.
SO my first Question is do I just create a form and let the user choose from Drop down menus to narrow down League > Zone > Fixture? OR use the website we have that is already broken down in to the sections and create a link from there to the form and use the link to pass in the League Zone Fixture Parameters ( also would this be easier with the time issue as i could disable the links)

Cheers.
Im guessing both ways would work but just interested in how you guys would do it

 

[mid_gen]

Not a direct answer to your question....but have you looked at Pitchero? My last few rugby clubs have used it and it's a great hassle free solution for running clubs/leagues.

*not in any way affiliated with Pitchero

 

[iKettles]

The second solution makes more sense from a usability perspective. If you had all the Leagues, Zones and Fixtures in a single dropdown it would get pretty unmanageable when there's a lot of items in the list.

Any reason you're planning to use Rails?

 

[hargi]

@iKettles no reason for Rails other then to dabble, why what are you thinking?

The current site is in wordpress as all I do is upload a team results and league standing to the correct area after there has been a match. Id still like to do that as its a 5 min job on a morning.
However I'm now thinking is it possible to get Rails to get information from wordpress?

So I'd have

<li>EASINGWOLD  <time datetime="2015-11-2">November 2nd 10.34</time><a href="linktoenteryform/?league=red&zone=north&fixture=easingwold" class="datelink"> SOME LINK </a>  </li>

Would I then be able to get to them params in a rails form or am I better making the whole site in the new language