FinFolio | Portfolio Management Software Blog

Our most recent release includes a REST API in the client portal. This is a special kind of web site that allows developers and power users to easily interact with the FinFolio data and reports. It allows advisers to extend, connect and build on FinFolio in exciting new ways.

Specifically, this allows things like the following:

• Mobile websites can access FinFolio data from JavaScript
• Display FinFolio data and report HTML on websites
• Applications written in any language can interact with FinFolio data
• Access FinFolio lists and calculations from Excel and 3rd party report writers
• Pull calculations and lists into internal dashboards

FinFolio has multicurrency built in at a core level. In Example #5 we create some currencies and FX rates and demonstrate valuing accounts in different currencies. With a real FinFolio database, the currencies would already exist and would be loaded into memory when the environment is initialized.

Initialize the environment, deleting the existing database and recreating it from scratch.

// Initialize the FinFolio enviroment
Console.WriteLine("Example05_MultiCurrency: Initializing...");
ContextAutomation.InitializeConfiguration("Standard", false, false);

As I mentioned before, the blog will get somewhat technical over the next week as we walk through some of the examples in the developer preview. I'll start with Example #4, which is a good introduction to the FinFolio objects.

The first line of every example is the InitializeConfiguration call that sets up the FinFolio environment. For now, we're creating the FinFolio database from scratch in every example, so it takes a few seconds. Initializing the environment does a few things. It establishes a connection to the database and loads all of the plug-in modules. Most of our functionality operates through the plug-in framework.

We just posted the developer release to the site. This is a toolkit for writing macros, automating downloads, and building extensions on top of our framework. There aren't any screens in this release, nothing but code. If you aren't an intermediate to advanced Microsoft .Net developer (or have one on staff), this is not the time to dive in--wait for the beta.

I'm very happy with our progress so far. All of our different development branches were tied together over the last couple weeks, and the end result is a clean, cohesive portfolio management engine. We're eager to get feedback from other developers.

Most of the last six months has been spent playing with different technologies, without much concern for time or completing specific functionality. We'll still be making many changes, but this release represents an internal shift from "ivory tower" mode into "let's build a product" mode. With the sole exception of the reporting engine, all of the big architectural decisions are behind us. Things should start moving much faster now.