Race Length missing = market_duration not working

Has anyone else noticed that the presence of the "Race Length" value (on UK Horse win markets at least) has become very intermittent recently? 

The lack of that value prevents any trigger involving race length to run time activating (whether a home-brew solution or the MPF's recently added market_duration value). Right now "Race Length" seems to be missing more often than note. 

Sometimes one can delete markets and reload them, in which case some of them do then get reloaded with race length present. But lots still aren't, and one is always aware of the account risks of regularly reloading the same markets. I'm assuming it's a Befair issue, presumbly they now can't be bothered to enter the value for the API until near race time, but still, it's been going on long enough and no-one else has mentioned it afaik. It used to just work from quite early, now it's seems entirely random whether it will be there or not. 

Hi
I just tested this loading all today's UK and IRE Win markets with the variables market_length and market_duration in engineer mode. There is a value shown for both variables in every market. Perhaps you could post a screenshot of the issue you are having?

Hi Mark, yeah, I won't tell you that's not what you saw, but that's definitely not anything like what I got yesterday. Even in the same racecourses, lengths were missing in some and not others. 

I've loaded up todays markets (10/11). And just in first two races there's a discrepancy. Down Royal  12.17 reports correctly (4425.70m), but Hexham 12.25 is set to 0.00m

No race lengths are reported for the next 7 races, including the second at Down Royal, 13.27, which did have a value present in the first.

Heh, meant to add, the second Hexham race was the inverse of the DownR exampl e- it does has a value here (4023m), when the its first race didn't.

For tomorrow I'll test a new default profile and a market locator and default triggers on just loading the main win markets. At least it'll rule in or out a corruption in current Settings, mfl or mft files if I then check it against my normal profile.

Ah, why wait . I had a sudden theory, decided to test. And yes, my hunch was confirmed: just loading win markets, it's fine. It's a side markets issue.

So it is a bug, although quite if it's MFP mishandling data or simply the way it orders the from the API, it's a problem with adding side markets.

In some scenarios I think MFP is over-writing the market_length value from the Win market, with the market_length from the side market (e.g. Place, AvB at the very least), which of course is 0 because BF doesn't list that info for anything else than win market. My guess is that if the race's Win market get loaded last, the value will be present even with the side market.

With market_length now null, as I noted in the OP, of course market_duration has to be null too because that's drawn from market_length.

So I think MFP needs to implement a fix for ensuring that markets don't impact the data of other markets.

Some further testing. If running Win and Place markets separately, i.e. Locate Win -> Add Win, then Locate Place -> Add Place, both Win and Place markets correctly report market_length. If running Locate Win+Place -> Add Win+Place, it came back with some missing market_length values. 

It's a little too early in the day to check the effect of AvB as those markets aren't created much before midday, but I'd assume including those markets exacerbates the issue.

I don't normally add markets until ten minutes before the first race (or at this time of year, until two minutes after the start of the first race )

Some further confirmation (I wanted to rerun the Win/TBP to check I hadn't made an error).

In the first image the Win and TBP were located and added in separate and exclusive searches. Race length/duration are present in the two bottom right boxes. In the second example Win and TBP were both located and added in the same search, and the data is null. 

Hi
Yes you are correct, I have replicated the issue you describe.

If you do an initial Market Locator search for Win markets only and load those markets, and then do separate Market Locator searches for Place, TBP, AvB etc., market_length and market_distance are shown correctly for all markets. If a combined search and load is done then these variables become intermittent. So separate searches is a workaround for the moment.

I have let support know by opening a support ticket for this and linked to this topic for their reference.

     

Thanks billybunt for reporting it and MarkV for reproducing and filing a ticket. I will have this fixed in the next update.

Just to make it clear: you will always need the Win market alongside any Place or TBP market in order to calculate the market_length value correctly, as that one is taken from the market name. However I see that the problem is, if the win market is added after the place one, the distance is not picked up correctly, and that's something I will fix.

Thanks for that Oxa 

8.12.1.1 looks to have successfully fixed this issue. Had no problems with this one in the past few days.

Thanks!