Price Retrieval Failure, Part 2

[John Ralls]

David,

Sorry for the typos, I should have tested first. Then I would have realized that of course price-quotes.scm eats gnc-fq-helper’s stdout--that’s after all how it gets the quotes. Unfortunately it seems also to send stderr to /dev/null so that approach won’t work without changing price-quotes.scm.

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Feb 8, 2018, at 9:05 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> John,
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion. I inserted the line as you indicated (at line 324 in my copy of gnc-fq-helper), but didn’t get any output on the command line after “Found Finance::Quote version 1.47”
> 
> I’m not much for perl, but I noticed your snippet had one ‘(‘, one  ‘{‘, and two ‘}’. I tried it that way, and then I tried changing the last ‘}’ to ‘)’, but that didn’t change anything. I also tried adding a semi-colon at the end of the line, without effect. Heck, I even tried putting a Hello world print statement, but that didn’t generate either. Either I am a bone fide idiot, or there is something else going on here. I’ve got my money on the first, but I hold out hope that it’s the second. Is it possible that I’ve latched on to the wrong file somehow? Or that the command isn’t going to the standard output?
> 
> David
> 
> P.S.: Should I be seeing:
> 
> /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-96.30.2/Common/ChunkCompression.cpp:50: Error: unsupported compressor 8
> /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-96.30.2/Libraries/CompressData/CompressData.c:353: Error: Unknown compression scheme encountered for file '/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/Exceptions.plist'
> /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-96.30.2/Common/ChunkCompression.cpp:50: Error: unsupported compressor 8
> /BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-96.30.2/Libraries/CompressData/CompressData.c:353: Error: Unknown compression scheme encountered for file '/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Library/AppExceptions.bundle/Exceptions.plist’
> 
> at the command line? This appears at startup before the F::Q note...
> 
>> On Feb 8, 2018, at 9:33 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us <mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Feb 8, 2018, at 6:52 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> In thread https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-January/074224.html <https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-January/074224.html> <https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-January/074224.html <https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-January/074224.html>>, I noted that after upgrading my installation from 2.6.16 to 2.6.19 on my Mac (OS X 10.13.3), Price retrieval was failing with the generic error: "There was an unknown error while retrieving the price quotes.”
>>> 
>>> *** As I noted there: Finance::Quote works at the command line:
>>> 
>>> $ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-check
>>> ("1.47" "adig" "aex" "aiahk" "alphavantage" "amfiindia" "asegr" "asia" "asx" "australia" "bamosz" "bet" "bmonesbittburns" "bourso" "brasil" "bse" "bsero" "canada" "canadamutual" "citywire" "cominvest" "cse" "deka" "dutch" "dwsfunds" "europe" "fetch_live_currencies" "fidelity" "fidelity_direct" "fidelityfixed" "financecanada" "finanzpartner" "finland" "fool" "france" "ftfunds" "ftportfolios" "ftportfolios_direct" "fundlibrary" "goldmoney" "greece" "hex" "hu" "hufund" "hungary" "hustock" "indiamutual" "known_currencies" "lerevenu" "maninv" "morningstar" "morningstarjp" "mstaruk" "nasdaq" "nyse" "nz" "nzx" "platinum" "romania" "seb_funds" "sixfunds" "sixshares" "stockhousecanada_fund" "tdefunds" "tdwaterhouse" "tiaacref" "tnetuk" "troweprice" "troweprice_direct" "trustnet" "tsp" "tsx" "uk_unit_trusts" "ukfunds" "unionfunds" "usa" "usfedbonds" "vanguard" "vwd" "yahoo" "yahoo_asia" "yahoo_australia" "yahoo_brasil" "yahoo_europe" "yahoo_json" "yahoo_nz" "yahoo_yql" "za" "za_unittrusts”)
>>> 
>>> $ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-dump -v alphavantage AAPL
>>> Finance::Quote fields Gnucash uses:
>>>   symbol: AAPL                 <=== required
>>>     date: 02/08/2018           <=== recommended
>>> currency: USD                  <=== required
>>>     last: 160.1350             <=\       
>>>      nav:                      <=== one of these
>>>    price:                      <=/        
>>> timezone:                      <=== optional
>>> 
>>> *** As I noted earlier: I restored the following two lines to /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/etc/gnucash/environment:
>>> 
>>> # Set AlphaVantage API Key to allow Finance::Quote to work
>>> ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY=************8SET
>>> 
>>> It seems to me that somehow Gnucash.app is not reading or using the ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY that is stored in its environment file. Either that, or somehow my environment file is not properly configured. However, I do not see any way to test these hypotheses. 
>>> 
>>> Can anyone tell me how I might determine **FROM WITHIN GNUCASH.APP** whether the Alphavantage API key is being read, and what its value currently is? Is there any other way to troubleshoot this problem?
>> 
>> David,
>> 
>> There’s no UI for examining the environment. I can only say that it works for me on MacOS 10.13 and GnuCash 2.6.19.
>> 
>> If you’re willing to hack a bit you could add a snippet to GnuCash.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnc-fq-helper to print out the value of the key:
>> 
>>  print (“Alphavantage Key: $ENV{‘ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY’}\n”}
>> 
>> Put it down at the bottom somewhere after the #Runtime comment. You’ll have to run GnuCash from the command line to see that output.
>> 
>> Geert pushed a commit last week that keeps the Alphavantage key in preferences instead of the environment file so that in 3.0 one won’t have to keep resetting the environment file.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>