Wealth-Lab ® Streamer Alert Manager Adapter 00.99.02 Beta

No longer supported

Most likely, the adapter won't work because of the changes in the Streamer protocol as well as in the Wealth-Lab adapter API, but the project could still be used as a starting point for those interested in developing similar adapters for Wealth-Lab.

Description

This software can be used as a

-         Wealth-Lab Alert Manager Adapter for Amertitrade/Datek Streamer or as

-         COM interface to Wealth-Lab Alert Manager which allows third party applications to send quotes into the Alert Manager, functionality not existent in Wealth-Lab 2.1 as of build 38.

 Installation

 The archive contains the following files:

Jalerts.exe – the adapter

Jalerts.bat – helper file which allows running the adapter with the login parameters.

readme.doc – this file

readme.txt – txt version of this file

sample.zip – a Visual C++ 6.0 project illustrating the writing of an Alert Manager adapter.

wlalerts.tlb, Jalerts.tlb – COM specific files, needed by developers in order to build their own adapters

Com.doc – description of the COM interface

Jalerts.tlb

Copy these files to any directory on your hard drive, for example c:\program files\jalerts. If the only intended use is as a Streamer Adapter, then jalerts.tlb, sample.zip and com.doc are not needed.

System requirements

 I developed and tested the Streamer Alert Manager Adapter (the Adapter) on a Windows 2000 Server machine, with the most recent service packs, security updates, and all the other updates installed, using Wealth-Lab 2.1 build 38.

It requires the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, jview.exe. This is normally present on all Windows versions except for Windows XP pre SP1. In order to get it, if you have this version, you will need to install Windows XP SP1 which you can find at http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/pro/downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.asp .

Usage

First start the adapter application with the right command line arguments (described below), then start the Alert Manager and choose QuoteTracker as provider. Add the desired symbols and activate the Alert Manager - quotes will be shown shortly.

Command line parameters

Here is a sample command line used to connect to Streamer:

Jalerts.exe /streamer user_name password

The Streamer user name and password can be obtained using the following procedure.

The user name is your Datek account user name. The Streamer password is different from the account password, and can be obtained thorough the following procedure: logon to your Datek account and run the Streamer Console. Right click on the console window and select “View source” which will bring up a text file containing the html source for the Streamer Console. In this file, search for the keyword “paramP”. To the right of this keyword you will see a quoted string containing hexadecimal characters – this is the Streamer password (excluding the quotes).

After you have these, open jalerts.bat for editing and add to the right of “jalerts.exe” first the user name and then the password, separated by spaces. Save this file.

You can now start the adapter by running jalerts.bat. A command line window will appear and you will see a series of diagnostic messages, the last of which should be “Running connection thread”. Now start the Alert Manager and select QuoteTracker as the provider.

Here is a sample command line used to get quotes through a different adapter (present on the system and registered):

Jalerts.exe /com “start-up parameters”.

The “start-up parameters” argument is optional and is specific to the adapter used. It can contain user name/password, an IP address or port etc.

Limitations and known issues

·        Currently not more than 80 symbols can be viewed in the Alert Manager using the adapter.

·        The connection to Datek is maintained open and quotes for the symbols previously requested continue to be received by the adapter even after the Alert Manager window is closed, so if you open and close the Alert Manger multiple times with different symbols, you may reach the 80 symbols limit. The solution to this is to restart the adapter, which will clear the symbols list. This will be changed in a future release.

·        Always open the Alert Manager window after the adapter has started and close the Alert Manager before stopping the adapter, or WL may crash. This seems to be an issue in Wealth-Lab.

·        Although functionally stable, I still consider the adapter to be beta quality, pending more feedback and testing.

·        The callback COM interface is not fully functional yet

On security

The bad news is that Streamer runs on an un-encrypted connection, which means that anybody could potentially see your Datek user name and Streamer password (SP). The good news is that SP is different from the Datek account password (DP), so the account is still safe. SP seems to have been computed by putting DP through a one-way function, which makes it impossible to get DP from SP. Thus, you should feel as safe using the adapter as you feel using the Datek Streamer client.

Contact info

 I would be very interested in getting your feedback. You can contact me for comments, bug reports, suggestions at michel@pacbell.net. Let me know if you want to be notified of fixes, new versions etc.

Disclaimer

I have worked hard on making sure that this adapter does what is supposed to do reliably and accurately, but one never knows…

Although I run a whole set of own tests and have been using it myself, you may experience run time problems (crashes, memory leaks, erroneous data etc). Please let me know of any problems you may encounter while using it, and I will do my best to fix them.

Please acknowledge that by installing and using the Datek Streamer Alert Manager Adapter, you accept that I, Adrian Michel, its developer, cannot be held responsible for anything bad that may happen because of it – use at your own risk.

Very importantly, this program should only be used in accordance with the Datek/Ameritrade Streamer user agreement, license agreement or any other terms and conditions that you and Datek/Ameritrade have agreed upon.

Datek/Ameritrade may decide to change the protocol or policies at any time, which may render the adapter unusable.

Copyright (C) Adrian Michel 2003