Creating an API to get Training Plan Data for my Cross Country Team

This is probably one of the most useful things I've created. I've always wanted to create something to benefit my cross country team. I attempted a few things things, like trying to make a strava clone that was better suited for our use, however with the release of iOS 15 widgets, a more manageable idea came to mind. What I wanted to achieve was quite simple: create a widget that would display a person's current run for the day.

I was quite please with what I was able to come up with. The part I found most difficult, however, was parsing the pdf that my coach was sending to us into JSON that can be easily understood by the client (widget) that is making the request. After a few days of head scratching, I was able to turn the PDF below into JSON. The below JSON snippet is what is returned by the server when a request is made asking for the plan for myself (Reich).

Soon after I begin this project I quickly found out taking information that was made to be human readable and turn it into something that is much easier for a computer to read is quite difficult. Because there was no "standard" for my coach, an issue I would routinely have to deal with is updaing the parsing function so it understands minor changes such as slightly different formatting. One thing that was commonly changed was the names of the different mileage groups. Usually, mileage group titles start with a number, however that wasn't always the case. Sometimes, such as in the PDF above, the "~" character is placed in front. Sometimes the word "Distance" would appear in each group on the line before the name of the group. So I had to add special cases for when a header started with those different things. After our season ended, my coach just stopped putting people's name's in the document, breaking the feature where a user could request training data given their name. Suffice to say, I was very quick to learn that parsing user data was much easier said than done. Slight changes in the way that the document was written, such as switching a "separator" character could break the parser. Just beacuse a document is visibly easy to read doesn't mean it is easy for a computer to read.

The resulting widget that would appear on a user's phone would look something like this: