Excel triggers question

[PeteB]

Hi Gary,

Quick question about the triggers:

When cancelling a bet, does "cancelled" appear in the betref column when BA receives the cancel instruction from Excel, or when you get confirmation back from the API that the bet has been cancelled?

And what happens to the mathced stake & odds column - can these be relied upon to show the proportion of the bet that wasn't cancelled?

Similarly - hwo can you tell from CANCEL-ALL that betfair has definitely received the instruction and there are no more unmatched bets?

Thanks,

Pete.

[PeteB]

Sorry - serves me right for reading the help file rather than testing...

So for CANCEL, it looks like if you provide a valid betref, if the bet is cancelled, then BA clears the BetRef / matched odds / matched stake details. If the bet is matched at all, then these columns will be populated with the details of the matched portion.
When the BetRef is cleared, can we be confident that the Cancel has hit betfair, or just that it has reached BA?

For CANCEL-ALL, it looks like you have to populate the BetRef column, but you can stick any number you like in there - when it is cleared, the CANCEL-ALL has been taken.
But agin, does this mean the Cancel All has hot betfair, or just BA?

[GaryRussell]

You can be sure that the CANCEL trigger has issued a cancel request to Betfair. The bet ref, odds and stake columns will only be cleared if the bet no longer appears in Betting Assistant. I have recently discovered a problem with this however. In the unlikely event (although now more likely considering recent problems with the API) that the cancel request was not processed due to a problem with the API and the bet refresh fails there is a possibility that it could be cleared and not cancelled. I will be adding extra safeguards in the next release.

CANCEL-ALL is more vulnuerable as you can only be sure it has sent the request, you are depending on there not being an API error. I will also be adding safeguards for this in the next release.

[PeteB]

Gary, that's great - thanks very much for the clarification.

I'm also checking MyBets - it's just complicated handling all the different events in whatever order they could come in, and making sure my code can't get confused and start staking madly!

[GaryRussell]

You can be sure that the CANCEL trigger has issued a cancel request to Betfair. The bet ref, odds and stake columns will only be cleared if the bet no longer appears in Betting Assistant. I have recently discovered a problem with this however. In the unlikely event (although now more likely considering recent problems with the API) that the cancel request was not processed due to a problem with the API and the bet refresh fails there is a possibility that it could be cleared and not cancelled. I will be adding extra safeguards in the next release.

CANCEL-ALL is more vulnuerable as you can only be sure it has sent the request, you are depending on there not being an API error. I will also be adding safeguards for this in the next release.

Version 1.1.0.41 now processes the cancel triggers in a more robust manner.

CANCEL will not clear the bet ref until a successful bets refresh has occurred and the list does not contain the reference.
CANCEL-ALL will not clear the ref unless the response from the API was OK, previously it would clear the ref regardless.

You can download the latest version using the link below. You must first uninstall the current version using the control panel.

http://www.gruss-software.co.uk/Betting ... a_Test.msi

[PeteB]

Gary - thanks that's great - I will give it a try!