[GNC] Getting security prices - Funnies

[Eric Coates]

John

Thanks for the explanations - and the bonus of explaining what the 
padlock means, the directory belongs (in this case) to root.

But, in my ignorance, I don't follow your comment that none of the 
directories of the form

    Finance-Quote-1.44-0xxxx

are needed after F::Q is installed.

Ameer Sengar and nvsoar have said that the file

    AlphaVantage.pm

needs to be slightly modified to overcome the throttling. The only 
copies of that file I can find on my system reside in the Finance-Quote 
directories (albeit several subdirectories down). I would have thought 
that deleting the Finance-Quote directories would negate the effect of 
changing the AlphaVantage.pm file.

What am I missing?

On your comment about using yahoo-json instead of AlphaVantage it's 
worth noting that the London Stock Exchange (where many of my securities 
are listed) quotes prices in pennies but yahoo-json interprets the 
numbers as pounds. Using yahoo-json makes one (appear to be) very rich! 
(However, it does work correctly to get European stocks - at least on 
the Frankfurt and Paris bourses - and I use it for those securities.)

Best wishes

Eric

===============================================

On 05/03/2019 19:54, John Ralls wrote:
>
>> On Mar 5, 2019, at 9:36 AM, Eric Coates <eric.coates at sky.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am running GnuCash 2.9.16 (with Finance Quote 1.47) on Ubuntu 16.04.
>>
>> In the course of some fairly standard (for me) work I have come across a couple of "funnies" and I'm wondering whether they are deliberate, "features" (from Microsoft's vocabulary meaning a bug that won't be fixed), bugs or me doing something wrong.
>>
>> On the last day of the month I need to revalue my share portfolio. Like others, I have been a victim of Alphvantage's throttling of their service but unlike others I have not (yet) screwed up my courage and updated the the related file to incorporate the delays suggested.
>>
>> I open the Securities Editor, make sure that the Get Quote column is shown (and, for simplicity at this stage, I'll assume no securities are ticked) and then, by double clicking on a security I get to the Security Information window and select Get Online Quotes, click Unknown and select Alphavantage from the drop down. I do this for five securities (no point in doing it for more because of the Alphavantage limitation). In the Price Editor I click Get Quotes and, after a wait, I get the prices for the five securities I selected.
>>
>> Having got those five prices I need to select a second batch of securities. But (*first funny*) I cannot deselect the previously selected securities by clicking on the tick - I have to go back to the Security Information to do that. Is that intended?
>>
>> Having deselected the Get Quote for a security, I have noted that if, in the same session of working with GnuCash, I return to the same security the Get Online Quotes option is not selected but the associated options are still intact. However (*second funny*), if I exit GnuCash (after saving of course) and then restart it and re-enter the Security Editor only those securities that were left ticked as Get Quotes retain the option information, all others are reset to the defaults.
>>
>> These two funnies make getting security prices (using this method) somewhat tedious and may mean that I have to really screw up my courage and make the changes to the file.
>>
>> Anticipating that one day I will screw up enough courage I have been investigating the file Alphavantage.pm. On my system I have five of them; in the directory ~/.cpan/build I have five directories three of the form
>>
>>    Finance-Quote-1.44-0 (they are 1.44-0, 1.45-0 and 1.47-0)
>>
>> and two of the form
>>
>>    Finance-Quote-1.47-iGUjLI (both are for 1.47 but with different
>>    tails, one of them has a closed padlock superimposed on the folder icon)
>>
>> Is this a *third funny*? Do I need all of them? If not, how do I determine which one I do need?
>>
>> The *fourth **(or is it only the third?) **funny* I've noticed is that if I rename a data file the Get Quote column is no longer visible in the Security Editor window. It's easy to get back so this funny is trivial but, out of interest, as the data file has not changed, why does it happen?
> You might try using yahoo-json instead of Alphavantage. It's not throttled.
>
> First funny: Yes, it's intentional. The check box in the Securities dialog box is display-only.
> Second funny: That's an artifact of the difference between the in-memory state of the Security object and its representation on disk; if  "get quotes" is off then the quotes element isn't written out.
> Third funny: I haven't seen that before. I've only seen the ones with the tail (which I think is randomly generated at build time). I imagine that the lock is because the directory belongs to another user. You can run ls -l on it in a terminal to see. Once F::Q is installed you don't need any of them.
> Fourth funny: That's because the window state of all windows lives in a file named after the data file. When you rename the file outside of GnuCash the correspondence is lost.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>   
>
>