Catalog

The catalog is the structure entries are made against. It has four levels, and fees, premiums, and rules can attach at every one of them.

The four levels

Division    →  Department    →  Section              →  Class
Adult          Honey            B · Honey               B-7 · 3 jars chunk honey, wide mouth jar
Teen           Photography      A · Educational         B-8 · 3 jars extracted light honey
Youth          Baked Goods      C · Other Hive Products

Level	What it is
Division	Usually an age band — Adult, Teen, Youth. The same department is entered and judged separately per division
Department	The subject area: Honey, Photography, Quilts, Beef Cattle. Has a superintendent
Section	A grouping inside a department: Educational Displays, Honey, Beeswax & Candles
Class	What an entry is actually made against, with its own fee and premiums

Rules at every level

Free-text rules blocks attach at department, section, and class level — ownership requirements, production windows, container specs, whatever your catalog says. All applicable rules are shown to the exhibitor at entry time, so nobody enters against a rule they never saw.

Fees and premiums

• Entry fee — what it costs to enter, set per class (and can default from higher levels)
• Premiums — the prize money per placement, entered as a series: 6/4/2 means first place pays 6, second 4, third 2

Superintendents

Each department has a superintendent. This is who receives that department's entries when a form routes conditionally, and who runs its judging.

Building the catalog

Paste a list

Classes go in by pasting a list, not one form at a time. A real catalog is hundreds of classes and a form-per-class does not survive contact with it.

The paste format is one class per line:

code · name | fee | premiums
B-7 · 3 jars chunk honey, wide mouth jar | 2.00 | 6/4/2
B-8 · 3 jars extracted light honey | 2.00 | 6/4/2
B-9 · 3 jars extracted amber honey | 2.00 | 6/4/2

Paste the block, review what was parsed, and commit.

Rolling over a year

The catalog persists between seasons. Most years are last year's catalog with a handful of changes, not a rebuild.

Entry limits

Limits are configurable and enforced at entry time on both the public entry page and the office screen:

• Per exhibitor — commonly one entry per class
• Per household — multiple entries per household are judged independently, but only the highest-ranked entry per household earns the ribbon and premium

The household rule is applied before ranking, so when the second-best entry from a household is suppressed the ribbons flow down to the next exhibitor rather than leaving a gap.

Anonymity

Exhibitor names never appear on entries. Every entry is labelled with the exhibitor number and a reference code, which is what makes anonymous judging work.

Still to come

• Catalog PDF import — extracting a published department PDF into the catalog automatically
• A preloaded template library of common departments to start from