Currency Exchange Rates Web Service
Tags : Development
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Here's a great little web service I came across while looking for a way to improve an expenses tracking package that I wrote a long time ago. I was thinking of ways to make the package 'multi-currency' so that when a user enters in their expenses the system would convert the amounts into the users payment currency.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has launched a pilot web service that will allow you to query the exchange rates on any particular day using a simple SOAP call. You could use this service to enhance your expenses tracking system by making on-demand calls to the webservice while the user enters the data or, and probably the way I'd do it, create an agent to make a daily call to the service to get the full list and then store it for a set period of time. Both methods have their pros and cons, the on-demand method may cause lots of requests to the service or may be thwarted by corporate firewalls while the agents may have access through the firewall but may end up pulling down data that will never be used.
You can get full details of the web service at the site above, this includes the service's WSDL which will explains all the different methods of calling the service and also the service endpoints that you need to connect to.
So what other uses could this have? Well if you work in a financial institute you could pull down the exchange rates for display on your corporate intranet or even write your own little currency convertor but then again a call to Google with '100 EUR in USD' might be quicker.
Bookmark :
Here's a great little web service I came across while looking for a way to improve an expenses tracking package that I wrote a long time ago. I was thinking of ways to make the package 'multi-currency' so that when a user enters in their expenses the system would convert the amounts into the users payment currency.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has launched a pilot web service that will allow you to query the exchange rates on any particular day using a simple SOAP call. You could use this service to enhance your expenses tracking system by making on-demand calls to the webservice while the user enters the data or, and probably the way I'd do it, create an agent to make a daily call to the service to get the full list and then store it for a set period of time. Both methods have their pros and cons, the on-demand method may cause lots of requests to the service or may be thwarted by corporate firewalls while the agents may have access through the firewall but may end up pulling down data that will never be used.
You can get full details of the web service at the site above, this includes the service's WSDL which will explains all the different methods of calling the service and also the service endpoints that you need to connect to.
So what other uses could this have? Well if you work in a financial institute you could pull down the exchange rates for display on your corporate intranet or even write your own little currency convertor but then again a call to Google with '100 EUR in USD' might be quicker.
