Database User Guide

The EPA database is crucial to the efficient running of the association and is available to any members who have login credentials.

These credentials can be given, amended, and taken away by users who already have a login with their own appropriate level of access. Levels of access vary depending on the requirements of the Association at that level and generally fall into county, regional and global access as required.

Access to the login page for the database is available in the Admin main side menu list of this website and is also available by clicking here.

On reaching the login page, there are some useful notes which you should take time to read and understand, and there are 3 items that you must complete to complete the login process:

1. User Id - this will be your EPA membership ID number.
2. Password - this will be set for you by someone else the first time you are given access to the database, but once inside, you can change it at will on your own personal data record.
3. GDPR - you must check this option to login which confirms that you are aware of the EPA Privacy Notice (see EPA Documentation), you understand that you must not share personal data with any third party other than as specifically approved by the individuals concerned or where there is a legal obligation to, eg Government, Law Enforcement etc. By ticking the GDPR box, you are indicating your understanding of this and also the cookie notice on the same page.

The main landing page for county officials will look something like this and there are 5 main groups of links to other pages. This is the main hub page for all database activities and can always be reached by clicking the link 'Database Index Page' at the top of the screen.

The main sections are:

• County Affiliation - these links are for county officials to manage the personal records of their members and for assigning offical roles to people as required.
• Personal Details - how is this different from option 2 in the list above?
• Events/Competitions - where county officials can request places for their teams in national events and manage player statistics.
• Counties and Leagues - an area to look up leagues and officers of all counties if needed.
• Help - some useful guidance documents provided by the database manager.

Note that near the top of the page, there is the option to 'Turn Help on'. This option is available on several pages across the database, sometimes near the top of the page and other times near the bottom. When clicked, it will reveal some useful tips for the current page.

The main county members information list will show the people listed on the database for the selected county in alphabetical order by Surname. It is possible for county officials to see this list for all counties, although it is not usually possible to see the editing and transfer options for counties other than your own, unless you have regional or global access permissions.

The key options on this page are:

1. To add a new person to your county click here. There is further advice on how to do this in the section on this page called 'Add New Person'.
2. The default loaded option when you first land on this page is 'Show Registered [Current Year]'. The other options in this line are very useful for finding player who were registered last year or even several years ago, who maybe are coming back to the county after a leave of absence. With this option, you can load their personal details and re-register them as required with their original membership number instead of creating a new and duplicate record of the same person.
3. The filtering section is extremely flexible and powerful for finding detailed information. Some examples include; setting the 'registered between/and' fields when you receive and invoice from the region to check that the invoice amount is correct, quickly finding a player whose 'name starts with', or finding all players who qualify as juniors for the current intercounty year (set the 'age under 19 on 1^st January next year') and many other filters. Filters can be compounded on top of each other to further define your search criteria.
4. The list of names is no longer than 60 per page, so these links here allow you to navigate to the surname starting letters as indicated.
5. The status of the player (can also be filtered in the filter section 3). A = Active, P = Provisionsl/Pending, S = Suspended.
6. The link to the person's individual personal data record for update or editing.
7. Click here to transfer a member to another county. This is where the transfer process begins when you transfer a person out of your county and into another county, which you select on the next screen after clicking here. The county official of the target county then has to accept the transfer on their own county database pages.

On this page we can add a new person to a county. Please be sure to check that the person does not already exist on the county records in the unregistered section before adding them here. We do not want duplicate entries on the database.

To register a person to the database for this year, set the option in the field '[Current Year] Registration' to 'Y' and Submit. Provided all their required etails are in place, this will set their registration date and the region will invoice the county for the required fee in quarters each year.

The mandatory data that is required to complete a registration are:

• Type (M = Men, L = Ladies, J = Juniors).
• First name and last name.
• EPA ID Number - this can be entered manually if you still have some of the green EPA ID cards by typing the number from the back of the card, although these cards are not required anymore to be a member of the Association, so you can use the checkbox to 'Auto-allocate' the ID number where the number will be added automatically by the database when the submission is saved. ID numbers can no longer be changed like they used to be if an ID card is lost because there is no longer any requiremnet to have a card, so once an ID number is allocated to a person, it is locked and will not change. If someone does not know their ID number, they should contact their county officials and request for it to be given to them from the database.
• Photo - is added at a later step and is not required here, although a registration is not complete until after it is added, and the person will remain in Provisional/Pending status until the photo is added and their registration date will not be set until this is done.
• First Line of the address.
• Postcode
• Date of Birth in the format dd.mm.yyyy. Take extreme care not to enter the person's date of birth into the 'First Reg(istered) EPA' box because this will make them zero years old. You can leave this box alone because it will automatically have today's date in it.

The use of the online registration form (available here) makes filling in this form much easier, because the details are sanitised and cleaned before they arrive in your inbox as an Email, and they can be copy/pasetd into the fields here.

All other fields are optional, but there are entries for all of them on the registration form, both paper and online. It is a good idea to fill in as much information as possible about all players to help you manage the members of your county pool association efficiently.

Note the section at the bottom where login details can be added for an existing member for access to the database.

Click the 'Submit' button to save the data. There are 2 of these buttons on the page, one near the top and one near the bottom.

After saving the record, and if you have a photo for the person, you can re-open their record from the Person List and add their photo from the section underneath their personal details:

Important points regarding the photos:

• Where a photo exists for a member, you will see the date that it was uploaded underneath the picture. The EPA Byelaws require that photos are not more than 10 years old, so please keep an eye on this for all members when the register each year and update as required.
• Photos need to be digital and be 'head & shoulders' style in a 3:4 aspect ratio, similar to a passport photo.
• The maximum file size for a single photo is 2 MB, but if you have photo editing software or app available, it can easily be cropped to just 480 × 640 pixels and saved at maybe 70% quality (this size and quality is more than adequate here) to create an image that is only a few hundred KB.
• The use of mobile phones to take photos is extremely convenient, but be sure to set the aspect ratio of the photo to as close to 3:4 as pssible and set the file saving type to .jpg
• Mobile phone photos can also sometimes be too big (i.e. > 2 MB) for the EPA database and a simple way to reduce the overall file size is to send the photo to yourself on WhatsApp, because WhatsApp always significantly reduces the size and quality of images when they are sent.
• Once a photo is selected and uploaded, it will not appear immediately on the person's record, but their registration will now be marked as complete and the registration date will be set. The photo will appear after a day or two following a routine processing script on the database server for all pending photos.

Here, we will describe the changes that will come about on our side when the Ultimate Pool app agreement comes into place in late 2024 or early 2025.

There are only two minor changes on the user interface of the database for personal records of county EPA members. Firstly …

• Previously, in order to complete a registration, the database required all mandatory fields to be filled in and a photo to be included to complete a person's registration for a year.
• Both of these still apply, but now there is a 3^rd additional requirement – the person must be also UP registered as per the 2022 Collaboration Agreement voted at the EGM. Note that they only have to be registered and this will not cost them anything financially, nothing other than submission of their registration on the Ultimate Pool platform.

What this means is, a person is not registered until all 3 required elements for the registration are complete.

For county officials – in the past when you filled in the required fields and submitted a photo, the player was then registered. Under the new arrangements, submitting their registration on our database will send them a link by Email which they can click to complete their registration on the Ultimate Pool side. Only when this is done will the data come back to the EPA database and the personal regsitartion will be completed automatically.

If you are concerned that a player is not fully registered to play say Intercounty pool and you have done everything on your side to complete the process, then you will need to chase them to complete the process on the Ultimate Pool side.

There is a new checkbox here which you can tick and then submit the data to re-send the link 'just-in-case' they haven't received it, but this automatically happens when you submit their registration anyway even if the checkbox is not checked, so we stress, this checkbox is a 'just-in-case' option for resending if needed, maybe because the person claims they never received it (check their Email address is correct, help them to check their spam folder, and so on …):

Secondly, the Email box for the person is now mandatory where it wasn't before. It has to be so that the Ultimate Pool registration link can be sent to them.

Finally for this section, it is important to consider people who maybe are not confident enough to perform these tasks on an IT device. Please help them, do it with them, suggest they ask a firend or family member to help out, find a way …

This page lists the officers that are included in the management and running of the county pool association and can also include team captains or other non-officer significant people within the organisation.

Additionally, it contains a list of the local leagues that are affiliated to the county and some other county-central information near the bottom.

People in the main list can only be selected form personal records that are already on the database for the county, so if you need to add a brand new officer or captain, you must first add them to the database (see the section 'Add New Person').

In the first column of the main list, we see 'Change Officer' and 'Edit [Name]'. The first option is for setting up the person as an official and the second option simply take you to the personal record of that person as described in the section 'Add New Person'.

Below the first section, there is a list of database access permission codes that we can see next to the person in the main table in the column 'Authority'. The county officials can decide for themselves which access codes to give to other members of this group. Note the key difference between codes p and q is the word 'edit' in the description.

IMPORTANT – if your county wishes to receive online player registrations via the form on the website, then there must be an officer title attached to the county that begins with 'Registration'. It does not matter after this if it is 'Registration Secretary', 'Registrations Officer' or any other text after 'Registration', but it cannot start with any other text, so something like 'Acting Registrations Officer' will not work, but ' Registrations Officer (Acting)' will work fine.

The online registration form is automatically NOT available to counties who do not have this officer setup on their system.

Additionally, the Registrations Officer must also have an 'Officer Email' specified (see below). If this is not also set then the registration form will not work for the county.

Similarly, if your county wishes to directly receive 'Contact Us' messages via the EPA website (click here), then there must be a 'Secretary' appointed.

For both of the above, please take great care with spellings as mistakes will stop these features from working.

The Secretary must also have an 'Officer Email' specified (see below). If this is not also set then any 'Contact Us' messages sent to the county will go to the Regional Director.

To set the Officer (and their official Email address), click on the 'Change Officer' link:

On the left here you can select a person to be appointed to the position, and their personal Email address that is on their data record will be added, but this Email address will not be made public. Only the Email address in the 'Officer Email' field will be made public and this is the address that MUST be filled in order for the player registration form and the contact us form to work directly with the county. The reason for this is that it allows (if you wish) for a different Email address to be used to protect the person's personal address.

You can also set here the database access permission codes as required for this person, up to an not exceeding the codes that you have yourself. Note also the comments on the page regarding the 'Officer Category' and apply.

It is possible to have people listed on the database who are not registered as current members. This is very useful sometimes for adding local league people as league managers who have not registered and do not play Intercounty or Interleague pool. Just add them as an individual to the county but do not register them so that you are not charged by the region for their affiliation.

A really good sanity check on your own county is to check this list. If there is no 'Officer Email' specified in the column on the left here for the Registration... then the online registratin form will not work for your county. Similarly with the Secretary for the main website contact us form: