Reporting racae position on daily card

[SamGledhill]

Hi there -

I'm messing around with a simple bot that compares odds between bookmakers and betfair LAY and BACK available prices. Becuase I'm mixing data from two seperate API's, my bot falls apart if there's any delays (for example, the rain delay and subsequent abandoning of the Manikato on Friday night here in Melbourne).

As best I can tell, the only consistent (and it is proving INconsistent!!) way of connecting these two datasets is via the race start time.

What would be perfect, would be a way on the Betfair API to identify the position on the card of a race for a particular meeting. So that this way - no matter what time it runs, or gets rescheduled to, we can know that we are looking for (example) the 6th Race at Moonee Valley - not the race that might start at 21:15!

Any tips?

One approach I've tried is to map the entire card first and then rank each race by start time, but the problem is that the listMarketCatalogue function only returns OPEN and future races - not prior closed ones. Also - the listMarketBook function works on a race-by-race proposition and I can't discover the marketId once the race has been run.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Cheers,

Sam

[jabe]

You can get race details for a number of days ahead. I don't know quite how far ahead, but a number of days. It might be different depending on the country the races are happening in. UK races and certain others should be reliably on Betfair. Get them ahead and store them somewhere.

A second point to consider is how often you intend to run your program. You may have a problem because development of your program is not happening every day, whereas when your program is complete you may run it every day and so never have a day in which your program is unable to get the next day's racing. Perhaps you could have an alternative starting function in your program whereby at start-up you can get it to just get the next day's racing. If your other API returns a different number of races, you could just get it not to process the relevant meeting and thereby avoid your bot getting upset.

A third thought is that results are stored for at least 3 months so should be obtainable somehow. My program does get results, but it uses the event id to get them, probably from listMarketBook (and if my program doesn't know about the event, it doesn't need the result). It might be possible to obtain these race results by specifying the date and the event status as closed rather than with specific event ids.