Developer Information

Developing for the Bettordata feed.

We welcome developers of all grades to write systems based on the Subscription Data model.
We are working to attract developers to the format so that a diverse range of products based on the data feed becomes available.
Home and private programmers are also most welcome and we will assist as much as time and resources allow.

Please register your project with us, just email developer@subscriptiondata.com and inform us of your project name and your contact details (name, address & phone number). After registering you are welcome to use the same address to ask for help in resolving development problems.

Please do not ask us to list products that you develop on our website as SubscriptionData.com is strictly product neutral.

Windows DLL Based API access to the data engine

SubscriptionData offers open format access to Bettordata information, where developers can obtain complete access to all programming information, code examples and data samples before purchase of a subscription is necessary.

The engine is accessed via a Windows 32Bit API called cdbdapi.dll. When invoked, this dll will look for the data engine in memory and if not found it will search for and execute the engine (cdbde.exe) and establish communications with it. The API communicates with the engine via a local loop-back TCP socket so your Windows needs TCP/IP support before the engine and API can communicate.

The server listens on port 479 by default. This can be overridden using the menu item "Setup -> Set IPC Port" in the Bettordata Engine. The protocol between the API and the engine is not documented and is subject to change.

The system includes a complete API to access all of the data that Bettordata supplies.
The complete details of the API can be found here in the API Definition..
A full description of the data is available here in the Data Definition.
These two documents together with the example code (contained in the zip file) clearly explain how to develop an application for Bettordata using the Subscription Data model.

DDE access to data

DDE access to the data is no longer supported.

Set up and required file details.

To get setup :

• Download the latest Bettordata Engine and unzip it to your harddrive.
• Start the Bettordata Engine(cdbde2.exe) and load(file -> import downloaded dayfile) the sample data file (20061107.txt) that came in the zip file.
• The Bettordata Engine is now ready to send data to your application through the API.

Once you have your application coded you will need to subscribe to the feed to resolve issues like timing etc as while all of the sample data is available to the engine, some things like timing of event display can only be tested with realtime data.

Please note that there is no formal install for the Bettordata Engine as the files should be included in the install of your Application.
The Data Engine does not use the registry (so everything can be accessed by remote control on embedded or hands free systems).

The core of the engine (which are the minimum you will need to deploy) consists of these files :
cdbde2.exe	Subscription Data's Bettordata Engine
cdbdapi.dll	API to access the data in the engine
sdapi.dll	Required support DLL
cdbde.cfg	Config file This file should NOT be overwritten when updating users of your software.
Notes: These files should be kept together in a common directory and before your application opens the DLL, change directory to this directory to ensure path problems are avoided.

Other files included that are not necessary for deployment are:
autoback.txt	This is a shadow file created every three minutes by the engine to back up the data in it's RAM based database.
api.h	C declarations of calls and defines used by the API
20061107.txt	a sample day file (same format as autoback.txt) for the 2006 cup day
C++ Builder/	Borland C++ Builder example application and source files
Delphi/	Borland Delphi example application and source files
VB2005/	Microsoft Visual Basic.NET example application and source files
VB6.0/	Microsoft Visual Basic example application and source files

Notes: This software is licensed for restricted use for development of applications based on SubscriptionData.com data feeds, to access the feeds, or to distribute with programs written to specifically utilise SubscriptionData.com data feeds only.