Treatment of trainer ID when second name added to training licence

Question

Hi

Is it possible to have a standard approach to this issue when it occurs?

For the last year it's been possible to have joint holders of a training licence in Britain. To my knowledge there are five examples of it - in each case an existing licence holder has added a second family member to the licence.

Paul and Oliver Cole

Simon and Ed Crisford

Daniel and Claire Kubler

John and Thady Gosden

Charles and Adam Pogson

The first three of these (Cole, Crisford, Kubler) seem to have been treated as 'continuity' licenses for the purposes of the trainer_id field in Smartform. It hasn't changed from the old single-name trainer_id in either the historic_runners or daily_runners tables (approach to the trainer_name field is a bit variable but that's a secondary issue).

The last (Pogson) seems to have been treated as brand new licence. New joint-name trainer_id (143566) supersedes the old single-name trainer_id (3016) in both historic_runners and daily_runners

The fourth (Gosden) confusingly seems to be treated differently in the two tables. In historic_runners the old single trainer_id (1652) looks like it's being retained for the historic_runners table based on the first jointly-trained runner which won yesterday. But the daily_runners table has a different trainer_id (147350) for entries under the new joint license.

This last approach is obviously problematic as any attempt to link to daily and historic trainer data using the trainer_id field will fail for this stable.

I have put a workaround into my daily processing script that hard-codes the specific 'new' IDs back to their 'old' equivalents in the affected tables.

But it would be good if there could be a consistent and clearly-described approach on this issue because it will become an increasingly fiddly thing to track and maintain as joint licences become more common.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Thanks for the question and clarifying the concern.

Unfortunately most source providers of licensed data are also struggling to implement a consistent solution to IDs in this regard, hence why you see some anomalies in Smartform.  Where possible we try to adopt source IDs since margin for error increases with repeated preprocessing and transformation of source IDs, and because there is a greater likelihood of getting this fixed at source.  However, the concern is noted and we will keep a close eye on it with a view to rationalising where possible (and where this is obvious, since arguably there may be a change in the training regime and therefore a different ID to the single trainer may be warranted) in future.