How to edit form filters

Edit Form Filters

Any of the five Form Filters can be changed from its default configuration to something more applicable to your own methods. You could, for example, configure a filter to show only past runs with a race distance the same as today’s distance, or a race distance within specified limits, or a distance similar to today’s plus or minus specified percentages.

Edit Form Filters is the term used to describe the process of changing the parameters, or the values thereof, that affect the way the particular filter works.

To begin to edit a form filter, click on  Setup on the menu bar, then choose Form Filters. The Edit Form Filters box will open, displaying the array of parameters available for use. By default, the Wet Tracks Filter tab is displayed and you can see that the going parameter has been ‘switched on’ (ie has a tick in the check box) and that two going values have been selected, namely S for slow track and H for heavy. When this filter is selected on the Form View it will show only the horse’s past runs on Slow and Heavy tracks – or more correctly, the filter blocks out runs on Fast, Good and Dead tracks.

The author of this particular filter decided to add another parameter, and ‘switched on' the margin parameter and added two values; -99 in the min- column and 2.7 in the max+ column. These values, added to the going values, specify that the filter will allow only the past runs where the horse either won or finished within 2.7 lengths of the winner on Slow or Heavy tracks.

The –99 (lengths) in the min- column is a value used to specify all winners. The minus (-) value actually means lengths ahead of the second horse, whereas 2.7 in the max+ column means lengths behind the winner. It is not necessary for GTX to use the plus sign (+) for positive values.

Select the tab of the Form Filter you want to edit and either deselect the parameters you want to be removed or click the  Clear Filter button. With the unwanted parameters now cleared. It is a simple matter of selecting, with a tick in the appropriate checkbox, the parameter/s you want to activate. In several cases you will need to tick a further checkbox or checkboxes; for example, if you were interested in viewing only past runs on Metro and Provincial tracks you would tick area and Metro and Prov. In other cases, you will need to tick the parameter checkbox, and then specify the range of values by adding min- (minimum) and max+ (maximum) values.

Checking  finpos for example, then entering the values 1 (min) and 5 (max) would block out all past runs where the horse finished sixth or worse.

Other parameters, such as distance, can be specified as an absolute range; for example 1200 (min) 1400 (max), or today’s distance plus or minus a specified distance (eg 100 (min) 100 (max) which means today’s distance plus or minus 100 metres. With the  distance %, you can specify today’s distance plus or minus a percentage.

These types of parameter specifications can best be explained by the following table, where for example, if the distance of today's race is 2000m, this would be interpreted by the 3 methods as follows: