Does anyone know if Selection Ids are absolutely unique?
For example, if Kauto Star has selectionId 123456 in race X, can any other selection ever re-use id 123456?
And if Kauto Star appears in another race (Y), will he keep sectionId 123456, or will he get another (new and unique) selectionId?
This is probably documented somewhere but I'm damned if I can find it...and it affects my data model!
Looks that way. Just done a trawl through my DB.
eg. Kauto Star has selectionId 600222 and has done for 65 different events.
Looked into this a while ago - betfair don't give any information or guarantees, but UK and Irish races since Jan 2007 seem to always use 1 SelectionId for 1 horse which doesn't change, whereas US and Australian races use a new SelectionId for each entry. AFAIK these SelectionIds aren't re-used for different horses.
I'd make as few assumptions as possible about what Betfair will or won't do. As I mentioned in a thread last year, I hard-coded the selectionIds for the football Total Goals market into my bot, because I could see from my database they never changed. Then one day the selectionId did change, but only for '4 goals or more'. All the others stayed the same. I can only assume someone went a bit mad in Hammersmith that day.
So it's probably reasonable to assume that there could be occasional random-looking changes in selectionId for horses also. You either take the risk it won't happen to you, or build your data model to allow for multiple selectionIds per horse.
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