High Frequency Sessions

Introduction

As a result of COVID-19, many leisure operators, when restrictions permitted them to re-open their doors, increased the number of swimming and gym workouts sessions available at their centres. Generally speaking, the intention behind such sessions was to start them every ten minutes (or fifteen minutes, etc.) to ensure a constant and regulated flow of people through the centres.

We refer to highly repetitive sessions like swimming lanes and gym workout as "high frequency sessions".

Antithetically to this, the number of other activities, e.g. group exercise classes, reduced dramatically to comply with social distancing guidelines. The knock-on effect of this was a dramatic increase in the number of swimming and gym workout data available as open data, and a reduction in other activities.

The intention behind high frequency sessions is to safeguard the UX for our customers' end users. By removing high frequency sessions, we can ensure that other activities that take place less frequently are not overwhelmed in the API's search results.

Even with COVID-19 restrictions being a thing of the past and the number of group exercise classes having returned to pre-pandemic levels, the notion of "high frequency sessions" still exists in our Events API.

The Events API's Default Behaviour

In order to prevent the search results you receive from being overwhelmed by swimming and gym workout data, the Event API includes iminTag[not]=HighFrequencySession by default in every call.

iminTag[not]=HighFrequencySession excludes highlighly repetetive swimming sessions and gym workout sessions.

The default behaviour of the Events API is to include iminTag[not]=HighFrequencySession in every API call.

As a result of this, a general Events API search, regardless of the different filters in use, will return neither swimming nor gym workout sessions. This is to prevent the search results from being overwhelmed by swimming and gym workout data.

It is not possible to use iminTag=HighFrequencySession and iminTag[not]=HighFrequencySession to return all activities in the platform, i.e. their use is mutually exclusive.

In the years since lockdown restrictions, the definition of "high frequency sessions" has been extended to include any other activities that are highly repetitive, e.g. some virtual activities in leisure centres that do not have require instructor and which generally take place more often than instructor-led classes.

Overriding the Default Behaviour

If you want to the Events API to return all data, then you can override the aforementioned default behaviour by included showAllSessions=true in your API calls. This will return all items in an API call, including all high frequency sessions.

In order to return only the swimming and gym workout sessions, you can use iminTag=HighFrequencySession.

For more pointers on how to use the HighFrequencySessions filter, please refer to Your Search Results and HighFrequencySessions in our Hints & Tips section.