OSCommerce Product Manager

Exchange rate should be automatically downloaded from a central web location.
We could use data from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY (http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/fxrates/noon.cfm), exported daily as XML,
or the International Monetary Fund (http://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/rates/rms_rep.cfm), available as CSV files on a daily basis.

For updating the currency exchange rate, we can do what OSCommerce do: use Oanda or XE service.

For Oanda, we request a page like this:
http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxdaily?value=1&exch=MXN&dest=Get+Table&sel_list=USD&format=CSV&redirected=1

MXN is an example of the source currency and USD is the target currency (how many MXN are in one USD?)

The result is embedded in an HTML page. Something like:
US Dollar,USD,10.964,0.091249

We would only need to find the string with three commas and two real/float numbers. Pretty brute, eh?

Automatic updating of exchange rates is a very useful and needed feature. We should raise the priority of this. (Or create a new feature request with higher priority).

PHP is better suited to parse text data than Delphi, maybe the parsing and extracting of the exchange rates from the source web pages can be done server-side and then passed to the client for confirmation.

A bottleneck in the server would be awful (as there is no direct status reporting). Also, if the server-side script stall too much, the client may not be able to communicate again to the server until that process is finished or the web server connection dies.

Better would be to get the web data from the client, send it to the server and then return the parsed data.

We could use PHP4Delphi (http://sourceforge.net/projects/psvlib) to parse execute PHP scripts inside Delphi.

Or maybe not, it would cause a license clash. The PHP4Delphi license is MPL, however links to PHP libraries, which use the PHP license. Both are incompatible with the GPL.

Any RegEx library for Delphi?

Adding, deleting and editing has been implemented.

Pending to write the automatic-updating code.

I think we should do all the processing locally: download the page, parse it, then previewing the changes.

On a second thought, I think using the server-side code would be easier. Let's try it first.

For multiple currencies, the URL would be something like:

http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxdaily?value=1&exch=USD&dest=Get+Table&sel_list=EUR_ILS_MXN_SIT_VEB&format=CSV&redirected=1

Implemented updating too. Doing the downloading and parsing, server-side.

Closing as implemented.

Forgot to document: setting the default currency is not supported yet.