Requirements: Need a stock web part, that refreshes in real time from Yahoo Finance. Given a stock symbol, the web part needs to fulfill the following requirements:
Req. 1) display the stock chart image for 1d, 5d, 3m, 1y, 2y, 5y, as shown in the screenshot below:
Solutions: Several third party web parts were investigated, but none fullfilled all the above requirements, so we ended up developing a custom solution.
Solution Approach #1: Our first attempt was to develop the web part in such a manner that it would load the images for Req. 1) and data points for Req. 2) in real time. For example, we tried to use SharePoint Designer to load the data and images directly using the Data View Webpart and the Content Editor Web Part. This approach has been described very well in this post. However, we noticed that we got HTTP Error 504 Gateway timeouts quite a few times during a day, thus causing issue loading the stock image and quote information. Thus, we decided to cache the image locally in a location accessible to SharePoint (we decided to use 14 Hive) and stock data points in a local database accessible to the SharePoint Page, as explained in Approach #2.
Approach #2: So it was decided to create a separate windows service that runs periodically and downloads the image to the 14 hive folder and data to a simple table in a database. The web part would load, in real time, the image from the 14 hive folder (Req. 1) and the data (Req. 2) from a database. This would prevent a timeout on the web part, ensure that it gets data locally and also improve performance.
The design diagram for this solution is as follows:
Req. 1) display the stock chart image for 1d, 5d, 3m, 1y, 2y, 5y, as shown in the screenshot below:
Req. 2) display stock quote information such as the following: Trade, Change, Open, PreviousClose, MarketCap etc., as shown in the figure below:
3) The image in Req. 1) and data in Req. 2) needs to be updated asynchronously while the browser is open.
Solutions: Several third party web parts were investigated, but none fullfilled all the above requirements, so we ended up developing a custom solution.
Solution Approach #1: Our first attempt was to develop the web part in such a manner that it would load the images for Req. 1) and data points for Req. 2) in real time. For example, we tried to use SharePoint Designer to load the data and images directly using the Data View Webpart and the Content Editor Web Part. This approach has been described very well in this post. However, we noticed that we got HTTP Error 504 Gateway timeouts quite a few times during a day, thus causing issue loading the stock image and quote information. Thus, we decided to cache the image locally in a location accessible to SharePoint (we decided to use 14 Hive) and stock data points in a local database accessible to the SharePoint Page, as explained in Approach #2.
Approach #2: So it was decided to create a separate windows service that runs periodically and downloads the image to the 14 hive folder and data to a simple table in a database. The web part would load, in real time, the image from the 14 hive folder (Req. 1) and the data (Req. 2) from a database. This would prevent a timeout on the web part, ensure that it gets data locally and also improve performance.
The design diagram for this solution is as follows:
Requirement 1) and 2) were fulfilled with the above design and in order to fulfill Requirement 3) we used the ASP.NET AJAX Update Panel that refreshes the web part asynchronously. I will be sharing the web part and windows service code on this blog soon.
1 comment:
Hey Ashish,
Nice job. this certainly save some time. whereas Do you know how I can extend it providing link for Today.Week,Month etc. I am trying to fetch chart image for today and its just not showing it. not sure if I am missing anything.
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