[GNC-dev] Thoughts on new Finance::Quote modules that require an API Key

[David Carlson]

I believe the AQ Banking feature has already solved the issue of saving
usernames and passwords for multiple financial institutions in a manner
that is easily migrated to new GnuCash releases.  Is it possible to do the
API Key thing in a manner that would seem very little different to the user?



On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 12:53 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jun 15, 2019, at 9:17 AM, Vincent Lucarelli <
> vincent.lucarelli at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > We are working on the next release of Finance::Quote and will try to add
> https://iexcloud.io/ <https://iexcloud.io/> as a new module.
> >
> > Like Alphavantage, users will need to register and get an API key.
> >
> > Since GnuCash is a major user of Finance::Quote, I wanted to get
> opinions on how to handle API keys.  I have two initial ideas:
> >
> >
> > 1. Each Finance::Quote module expects a module specific environment
> variable and GnuCash would need to update the Preferences > Online Quotes
> pane for each API key.
> >
> > 2. We invent a more global environment variable that can hold multiple
> API keys. For example, something like
> >
> >
> FQ_API_KEYS=ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;IEXCLOUD_API_KEY:sk_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> >
> > The problem with the first approach is that GnuCash preferences need to
> change with each addition.
> >
> > The problems wit the second approach are usability and parsing (do we
> assume no service would ever include : or ; in the API key?).  The later
> could be solved with json formatting, but that is even worse for users.
> >
> >
> >
> > Appreciate any suggestions.
>
> Vince,
>
> Excellent news, thanks for stepping up to help Erik out.
>
> ';' in your FQ_API_KEYS will have to be quoted to keep the shell from
> interpreting it, and any quotes in the key would have to be escaped even
> with separate environment variables per service. Telling users to escape
> the delimiter character and quotes is easier than teaching them to format a
> JSON string. e.g FQ_API_KEYS="AlphaVantage:xxxxxxxxx\"xxxx\:xxxxxx...". The
> real problem with that is that it breaks backward compatibility with
> GnuCash, which sets ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY when the preference is set. That
> could be worked around by continuing to look for the older environment
> variable, or telling users to set the new environment variable themselves,
> which they'd need to do anyway to use a new service until we rewrote the
> preference item. Note that we're two weeks away from our next release, so
> that change would be in the September release at the earliest.
>
> Environment variables are clumsy. Might you consider an alternative,
> perhaps a "set_key(service, key)" function on the Finance::Quote object?
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
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-- 
David Carlson