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Chip Timing Integration

If your competition uses RaceTec to process chip-timed results, OpenTrack's simple integration means that you can pull in real-time results, allowing you to manage your competition fully on OpenTrack, and let your timing company to focus on what they do best — capturing results!

Integrating OpenTrack and RaceTec

To integrate RaceTec with OpenTrack, head to the TV and Photofinish management screen, scroll to RaceTec, and click INTEGRATE.

OpenTrack has two methods for integration - this documentation covers Option 2, where OpenTrack fetches data from Racetec web pages. These sites update each minute during the race, and have a hidden option to publish results in CSV, which we pull in.

Example single RaceTec results page — Dulwich Podium 5K

You may have multiple races within the same competition, set up to show as different tabs on your Racetec website, as below. Each tab has a different URL that can be mapped to a heat in OpenTrack.

Example tabbed RaceTec results page — Top Flight Battersea 5K

Copy and paste the RaceTec results URL for each heat/event combination into the correct box on the integration page, and click SAVE.

RaceTec Integration - Capture and save the URL

Configuring columns for individual races

RaceTec is very flexible and lets operators configure many columns. OpenTrack looks for the following columns:

  • Place or Position: pos
  • Bib: bib or race no
  • Time: time, net time, finish or gun time, in that order
  • Splits: any number followed by km such as 5km or 1.8km

Note

  • OpenTrack will pick up columns whether they are in upper or lower case
  • If you have more than one column matching a field listed above, OpenTrack will take the first, as per the order above

The below results with splits would successfully be collected by OpenTrack:

RaceTec Integration - the source page (1)

How we process the results

We take RaceTec's positions and keep them, rather than auto-scoring based on the fastest times.

We assume athlete details are in OpenTrack, ignoring any names in RaceTec. For anyone showing as an Unknown Athlete, add them with the correct bib number in Manage Competitors.

When processing the final result of an athlete or team, OpenTrack expects either a time in hh:mm:ss.ms format (e.g. 00:49:25.32), or any of the following non-result statuses: DNF, DQ, QRY, UOF, Started, Not started.

When you want OpenTrack to collect the latest results, click FETCH.

Live Results

To have live results updating throughout your competition, head to the bottom of the integration page on the day of competition and enter the time when all races should be finished.

Press GO, and OpenTrack will fetch results every minute until the set time.

Fetch results until...

Testing pre-race

To ensure your competition can run smoothly, it is vital to test the RaceTec integration before your race starts.

This can be done on our test server.

Fake some results, including splits (if being used), and publish on your RaceTec website. Check you can fetch the results into OpenTrack.

If the results do not appear in OpenTrack, check your column headings are correct. If you are happy with your column headings, then feel free to get in touch and we can take a look for you.

If you need a change to OpenTrack's RaceTec integration (i.e. to process or ignore an extra column), we need to be told during the working week, with a link to a realistic results page to pull from.

Relays with Live Leg Splits

OpenTrack can collect individual split times in relay races from RaceTec, but each leg must be labelled correctly and appear to the right of other data.

Each leg should be named Lap {leg_num}, giving multiple columns named Lap 1, Lap 2, etc. We will allow and ignore spaces and capital variations, so lap1 and Lap 1 are equivalent to us.

Leg naming conventions

The headers in RaceTec for relay splits vary from organiser to organiser, and we're happy to make changes, as long as agreed and tested in advance.

BMAF Road Relay Results

Pushing from RaceTec's UI (deprecated)

Option 1 in OpenTrack's RaceTec integration is for pushing data from RaceTec's user interface.

This functionality was added to RaceTec in 2017 — if you would like to use it, please get in touch.

To set up, an encryption key needs to be set within OpenTrack and RaceTec, to grant RaceTec permission to push results to OpenTrack, and the OpenTrack competition URL needs to be set within the OpenTrack tab of RaceTec.

RaceTec will then send a results to OpenTrack every few seconds as people pass timing mats.