external ticker data import

[chartist22]

To make a long story short(ish); I am developing an application for virtual trading of OMX listed tickers and the old code imports Oracle data (batch import) in raw text for stocks (for fusioncharts output). The graph gathers data from a textfield in the form "x;y;z...." where the variables represent ticker values. Now I need to get the data elsewhere as the Oracle feed will cease to exit in the near future.

My question is; what is the easiest way of importing ticker data into a textfield (delay is ok)?

I have had a brief look at Yahoo Finance quotes that has *.csv files for download. I have a string function that will take care of the conversion from text into graph data but how can I make an http request to get the data into the textfield in the first place?

Thanks for any help!

[chartist22]

Ok, why not replying to my own post then : ... I tried importing data through the XML import function (http request) but this won't work as FM will not even consider the file unless it conforms to XML standards so no luck there. ..

Went on to try out Mooplug (what a wondeful little plugin!) that has a great function for downloading any file through an http request, as a string into a textfield. Great stuff .. I thought ... It turns out that importing whateverdomain.com/thefile.txt works fine but for example http://quote.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GOOG&f=l1gh&e=.csv will generate an error, unable to open file. My theory is that the query string is the above URL but the result and the file coming back is not matching (the server side script generates a file called "quotes.csv") ... anyone else with similar problems?

Any thoughts welcome :)

[Fenton]

When I ran your code it returned a message that the web page had moved, to:

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GOOG&f=l1gh&e=.csv

Which returned a comma-separated list: "437.92,430.62,449.34"

But it didn't download a file.

I didn't try it with MooPlug on Windows yet, but it works fine on Mac, via AppleScript or in a Filemaker native web viewer object.

[P.S. You can get multiple symbols, each on its own line, by entering them separated by commas (no space).]

[chartist22]

Thanks for your reply Fenton. It could be that the yahoo location/syntax has changed but I still have the problem of getting the results back into a field. I tried loading it through the web viewer which works fine, like you pointed out. The problem is that I cannot read, manipulate or manage this data in any way. I chatted briefly with Adam (MooPlug) who confirmed that his plugin doesn’t work (yet) with dynamic URL’s (like the yahoo one, and all others that I have found) so I’m kind of back where I started. I’m surprised that there is little info out there on this particular problem … there must be thousands that would want to import live ticker data into their filemaker apps, or any live server data from dynamic URL’s … one would have thought …

By the way, thanks for that last tip about multiple data .. didn't think of that. Could actually be worth looking into and perform a manual import of the whole batch.

[Fenton]

You can "scrape" the content from a web viewer, if you name it as an object, in the Object Info box (where the size, etc. is), using an unstored calculation;

GetLayoutObjectAttribute ( "wv1" ; "content")