Concert Itinerary Slicer-Dicer Templates

(Note: Anywhere you see something like send a "foo" command to the Musi-Cal command processor it means to send an email message to concerts@musi-cal.com with a message body of "foo".)

It is apparent that using the Concert Itinerary Slicer-Dicer to generate input for Musi-Cal is not child's play (knives never are).

Here are a couple templates people might find useful when getting started with the Slicer-Dicer. The first assumes you have date, city, state, venue and phone for each gig and that the artist (Ben Smith, a fictitious acoustic folkie) is playing a one-nighter at each spot on his midwest tour.

    default
    performer Smith,Ben
    type folk
    keywords acoustic
    pattern %{Smonth} %{sday} %{city}, %{st}, %{venue}, %{info}
    end

    convert
    June 27 Toledo, OH, Buck's Cafe, (999)555-1212
    July 1  South Bend, IN, Strung Out Coffeehouse, (888)555-1212
    ...
    end

In this example, we want everybody to know that no two shows are alike, so we add a program note about the music he will play. Also, note that he plays the venues more than once. In particular, he plays the Strung Out Coffeehouse on four consecutive Saturdays in July. I changed the %{sday} specifier for the day to %{days}, which can handle comma separated dates and date ranges.

    default
    performer Smith,Ben
    type folk
    keywords acoustic
    pattern %{Smonth} %{days} %{city}, %{st}, %{venue}
    program An eclectic group of songs, different every night
    end

    convert
    June 27-28,30 Toledo, OH, Buck's Cafe
    July 1,8,15,22  South Bend, IN, Strung Out Coffeehouse
    ...
    end

The command processor converts the above to multiple "add" commands and submits any for which no warnings or errors were generated. The submitter will receive email identifying those lines that were converted and submitted and possibly a second message containing "add" commands for which warning or error messages were generated. These must be reviewed for completeness and correctness, then sent back to concerts@musi-cal.com for actual insertion into the calendar database.

If you are responsible for a particular artist (or group of artists), I suggest you start from one of the templates above, modify it to suit your needs, then save it for later use.

If you repeatedly update the same artist's itinerary, add a special keyword in the "defaults" command that uniquely identifies this artist. The keyword must have a leading dot followed by a name that can only contain letters, hyphens and underscores, another period, and a number. For example, we might use ".bensmith.222" for the Ben Smith itineraries:

    default
    performer Smith,Ben
    type folk
    keywords acoustic,.bensmith.222
    pattern %{Smonth} %{days} %{city}, %{st}, %{venue}
    end

The special keyword triggers the generation of a "delkey" command right before the "add" commands which causes all entries in Musi-Cal with this keyword to be deleted right before all the new entries are added.

There are also some heavily annotated templates available as plain ASCII text. They can be retrieved by email by sending a "help template" command to the Musi-Cal command processor.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to call or write.

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