European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Visio Diagram (v2)

UPDATE!

Hey football/soccer fans! We’ve got an update to our automated smart drawing for this years European Cup soccer tournament.

Perhaps you are familiar with the first version, which can be found here: European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Diagram

Well, that version needed a few updates, most notably, the handling of games that are resolved with penalty-kicks, or shoot-outs.

The web service documentation did not sufficiently describe how these situations were reported, so we had to wait for Turkey’s spectacular victory over Croatia to see what kind of data we got. It turns out, that the scores are just reported as strings. So for Croatia vs. Turkey, we got:

1-1 (P 1-3)

Clearly some text parsing was in order, and the new version should handle it just fine.

While I was repairing the code, I enhanced some other bits. These are the new features for v2:

• Although there is no winner box, the winner will be clearly shown.
  You might have noticed how in the thumbnail for this article.
• Draws are now indicated with color, instead of left as though nothing happened.

• Penalty-kick situations are now properly handled by the shapes and code:

Enjoy the rest of the tournament!

Please note, if you haven’t already configured the first version, that you need to Download and install the Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0 from Microsoft in order to get the web-service code to work.