Import from Columba: your results, without retyping them

Draft: reviewed line by line before open testing. Don't take anything at face value.

If you fly in a county whose classifications are published on Columba, you no longer have to type your results in by hand. You open the race, look at what the app found, and confirm. The rest is work you stop doing.

What you need, once

In Settings → Federation you fill in two things:

Breeder code — exactly as it appears in the classifications, SB195 for example.
Columba county ID — the idj number from the address of the classifications page.

You do this once. Without the county ID we cannot even open the right page, so the import will tell you plainly that something is missing, with a shortcut into Settings.

How it goes

Races → New race (+) → Import from Columba, or from Settings.
Choose the season — this year or last.
Choose the race from the list. Races whose classification is not out yet are greyed, marked "classification not published" — you can see them, so you know they exist, but they cannot be opened.
You get a Preview: how many results are yours, which birds are new, and what matches what you already have. Nothing is saved until you confirm.
You confirm. The race and your results go into your loft.

Races you have already brought in are marked imported, so you do not open one twice for nothing. If you open it anyway, the app tells you it has been imported and offers you a button to the race.

What is read

Only when you press. The app does not look at Columba on its own, does not check anything in the background, and has no "sync automatically". Exactly two things are read: the season list you chose, and the classification of the race you opened. Nothing else.

Your phone never talks to Columba directly. The request goes from our server, once, identifying itself honestly.

What is kept

Your rows — the position, the arrival time, the velocity, the distance: your results.
The race's facts — the release point's name, the date and time of liberation, the distance, how many birds were liberated, how many placed, the category.

The race's facts belong to nobody: they are properties of the flight. That is why a race read once serves everyone who flew it. If another fancier imports the same race later, no request is sent at all — the answer is already here. The more of us there are, the less we trouble the source.

What is never kept

A classification contains the whole county: names, breeder codes, localities, clubs. None of that is saved. The page is read whole, because it cannot be read any other way, but all that survives it is your rows and the race's facts. The rest is discarded before anything is written.

We do not republish classifications, we do not build a database of other people's birds, and we offer no search through anybody's results. The app brings you your data.

When something goes wrong

The messages are short because they are honest:

What you see	What it means
Your federation profile is missing something.	You have not filled in the county ID or the breeder code. The button takes you straight to Settings.
Too many requests in a short time.	We hold ourselves to a pause between requests, so as not to load the source. It tells you how many seconds.
The source is temporarily unavailable. Try again later.	Columba did not answer, or asked us to stop. We do not insist — try again later.
The classification could not be read. Try again later.	The page looks different from what we expected. That is our problem, not yours.
a message saying no result carries your code	The race was read, but your code is not in it. Check the breeder code in Settings.

We never retry on our own. If the source tells us to stop, we stop — and we tell you, instead of trying ten times in silence.

What stays yours

All of it. Imported races and results export to CSV like any others, from Settings → Export race results (CSV). Nothing that comes in here becomes harder to take out.