Topic: Changes to selectionId

"Hardly a big deal I know, but why on earth would they change one of the seven? Do they often do this sort of thing? Do they hate us that much? "

I think this comes under Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence :-).

Having said that, there are a few places in my code where I make assumptions that SelectionIDs won't change, usually accompanied by comments like 'fix this to make it more robust', because I realised it WAS an assumption, but, touch wood, nothing has broken so far..

One thing I do is uniquely identify horses by the SelectionId, in fact I use it as the Primary Key in my Horse table. I did some initial testing a year ago which indicated this didn't change between races or seasons, but nothing in the documentation says this. I shall do some checking tonight to see if any have changed, and report back.

Can't find any changes in selectionId for horses running in the UK and Ireland after a quick check,(in the past 14 months anyway), but I will cross-check with Sporting Life when I get a chance.
For US races they seem to assign new SelectionIds for each race, but I don't bet on those so it's not a problem. Seems strange that they treat these differently, maybe something to do with where they get the original race entry data from.