[GNC] Accessing online currency rates

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 4, 2020, at 2:26 PM, Eric Coates via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Good Evening
> 
> A query of absolutely no real consequence.
> 
> In the past (a) for as long as I can remember, currency conversion rates appeared "by magic" on demand and (b) I used AlphaVantage to get the price of shares and thus, of course, had to have an AlphaVantage key. But it became possible to avoid the frustrations of Alphavantge's throttling by using Yahoo as JSON but I didn't bother to remove the AlphaVantage key from gnucash.
> 
> Recently, I did a complete reinstall of my operating system (Ubuntu) and installed gnucash from the standard repositories. I didn't think to re-input the AlphaVantage key (I'd rather forgotten about it). But I noticed that I was failing to get the conversion rate for Euros to GB Pounds. That wasn't of any real concern as I only revalue my portfolio once a month (and you'd not believe how pretentious that sounds to my ears!) and adding in a single conversion rate by hand was trivial.
> 
> However, prompted by Samantha Payn's note I added the AlphaVantage key back into gnucash and now (it seems) I can get the Euro/Pound rate.
> 
> So, the "no consequence query": Is it necessary to have an AlphaVantage key to get currency conversion rates?

Yes, because when Yahoo! withdrew their non-json quote service the Finance::Quote maintainers decided to make Alphavantage the currency source. At the time it wasn't clear that Yahoo! would continue the json service; that's sort of still true, AFAIK they've never said one way or the other. It could disappear without notice.

Regards,
John Ralls