Charles Schwab OFX (online

[Ed Soniat]

How I got my Charles Schwab Brokerage Accounts balances and transactions
downloaded int gnucash 2.0.4 on fedora core 6 with OFXDirectConnect (OFX
Direct Connect)

I use the Fedora (Core 6) software installer to get gnucash and it
fetched 2.0.4 that inludeded an enabled aqofxconnect, so I didn't have
to do anything to gnucash itself just configure the accounts. 

After reading the "Setting up OFXDirectConnect in GnuCash 2" 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Setting_up_OFXDirectConnect_in_GnuCash_2

Went looking for the FID/ORG/URL etc for Schwab broker, distinct
from Schwab bank which is a more recent entity created by Schwab. 

Google did me no good nor did this mail archive search here.

Some where I found a link to this site:
http://www.jongsma.org/gc/
Which has some scripts and data for financial institutions OFX servers.

I think I had to add tidy or maybe xmllint to my installed software, I
know I had curl. 

I ran getfidata.sh which downloaded and parsed a bunch of
UTF-16 xml files.  Three files bank.xml, brokerage.xml, and
creditcard.xml are all indexes into the files found in the subdirectory
"fi". I looked in brokerage.xml using firefox. And found that Schwab
had an entry with a guid value of 5104.  I then looked in the "fi"
directory and opened the file 5104.xml

This has some useful information including the BrokerID of SCHWAB.COM
 (case sensitive) and the ProvicerURL of:

 https://ofx.schwab.com/cgi_dev/ofx_server

But the FID and Org values were empty.

At the suggestion of David Reiser and Dinesh G Dutt I used the
following values in my 


FID       5104
ORG       Schwab.com
Broker Id SCHWAB.COM

Server URL https://ofx.schwab.com/cgi_dev/ofx_server
 
Selected Support Account List Downloaded
Selected Support Statement Download
Selected Support Investments
Selected Supports Bill Pay

Selected Send Empty Bank Id
Selected Send Empty FID

Then continued with the instructions found in the link above for
setting up OFXDirectConnect.   The account lists were fetched and I
was able to get transactions for one or two of the accounts.

I did not have accounts already created so just for a test I let it
create the accounts with automatic names, not a good idea so I'll
start and create accounts first or be careful about what defaults I
take.


Thank you for the prompt and effective responses.

-- 
Ed Soniat