Navigation Data

[curtmantle]

Has anyone tried extracting the Navigation Data as outlined here: Navigation Data for Applications?

I've managed to successfully make a call to the address and get the response back, but it takes a long time to return - something like 20 seconds just to get the raw Json back on a fast internet connection.

I can't think of a way to make the call more efficient - there doesn't appear to be a way to filter it.

Am I missing something? I can use the Market Navigation but the Navigation Data seemed convenient.

[JayBee]

What are you trying to achieve? There maybe a quicker way through the standard API.

[curtmantle]

I've already got a navigation system working using the standard API but I thought I'd try out the Navigation Data call as it supposedly replicates Betfair's own navigation menu.

[JayBee]

I never bother gathering the whole tree as I only trade on one sport and even then just two market types.

Building the whole tree for all sports is not much use unless you are building a third-party trading application for public consumption. Cue Mr Belo.

[curtmantle]

I was only looking into Navigation Data out of interest not for any specific purpose.

[Mr Magoo]

I've managed to successfully make a call to the address and get the response back, but it takes a long time to return - something like 20 seconds just to get the raw Json back on a fast internet connection.

It takes about 5-8 seconds for me to download the raw data. Are you sure you're not including the JSON parsing time? It's a large file and might bring to light inefficiencies in some parsers.

Another speedup might be to ensure that you have compression enabled in your requests - that might help some of the transfer speed.

In any case, it's definitely slow, so I end up caching the returned data on disk for a time (there's no point fetching it repeatedly anyway, since the navigation data itself is not always up-to-date)

[curtmantle]

Thanks for the info Mr Magoo. It's possible I was having connectivity problems on the day... or Betfair were.

My standard method of retrieving navigation data is via the betting API. I'll retrieve the Event Types I need and when one of those is selected in the UI I'll retrieve say the Countries with markets for that Event Type and so on.

[jabe]

Just a point here: I don't know what effect gzip has on this, but the downloaded file when I tried it was somewhere between 5MB and 6MB.