I am using an OFX download function written in Python similar to ofxclient to download bank and credit card transactions. However, it only retreives posted transactions, not ones that are in progress. This results in the account infomation frequently being out of date by a day or more. I realize these pending transactions could be temporary (holds, etc.) But most of the time they turn into permanent transactions after they post or drop. But is there some different OFX command I can use to request pending transactions, with the understanding that they are subject to change? It is possible to see them from the web site of every financial institution I have tried, but trying to scrape web sites is out of the question and OFX I though was designed to avoid the need for such non-standard procecures.
Try the <INCLUDEPENDING> flag; see OFX Spec 2.2 - 2017, page 207.
It defaults to N. So, try:
<INCLUDEPENDING>Y
Note: The backend server must support this feature, which is available with OFX 2.2 (VERSION:220).
Related
I'm interested in downloading my transactions from Chase without using a third party such as Mint, Quicken, Yodlee, Plaid, and so on. I don't trust third parties with handling my data, which is why I want to do it myself.
Works as of 1/8/18
Summary
Chase uses OFX to support programmatic interactions with its financial data. It does so somewhat reluctantly however, as this fact isn't widely advertised nor well documented - banks would rather have you use their products directly, rather than go to third parties. That being said, support for desktop products like Quicken still exists, and so one method is to spoof yourself as a desktop product (the other options are to use a third party service or use a screen scraper). Obviously this solution is completely at the mercy of Chase's whims, and as a discouraged access pattern this is not robust. But you're still reading, so let's do this!
Solution
Set up your account to accept connections from Desktop apps
Account > Profile & Settings > Manage Account Security > Desktop apps > Click enable
Generate a Client UID. Chase will use this to verify that the OFX requests it's receiving are intended.
Go to https://www.uuidgenerator.net/ and generate a UID.
Use ofx-ba-tfb.py to POST the following to https://ofx.chase.com. Comments begin with a # sign, do not include them.
Headers:
OFXHEADER:100
DATA:OFXSGML
VERSION:102
SECURITY:NONE
ENCODING:USASCII
CHARSET:1252
COMPRESSION:NONE
OLDFILEUID:NONE
NEWFILEUID:{Insert random alphanumeric string}
Payload:
<OFX>
<SIGNONMSGSRQV1>
<SONRQ>
<DTCLIENT>20180108012004
<USERID>{Insert user id}
<USERPASS>{Insert password}
<LANGUAGE>ENG
<FI>
<ORG>B1 # Comes from ofxhome.com
<FID>10898
</FI>
<APPID>QWIN
<APPVER>1800
<CLIENTUID>{Insert random alphanumeric string}
</SONRQ>
</SIGNONMSGSRQV1>
<CREDITCARDMSGSRQV1>
<CCSTMTTRNRQ>
<TRNUID>{Insert random alphanumeric string}
<CLTCOOKIE>4
<CCSTMTRQ>
<CCACCTFROM>
<ACCTID>{Insert account id here}
</CCACCTFROM>
<INCTRAN>
<DTSTART>20171208
<INCLUDE>Y
</INCTRAN>
</CCSTMTRQ>
</CCSTMTTRNRQ>
</CREDITCARDMSGSRQV1>
</OFX>
Verify the request
You will get a response that says,
"Please verify your identity within the next 7 days. Using your desktop computer, go to your bank's website and visit the Secure Message Center for instructions." After a small delay (in minutes), you will receive a message in your Secure Message Center asking to confirm that you made this request. Confirm the request. This response and verification happens with each new Client UID you submit.
Make the OFX request again, and you should receive your transactions!
Comments
Many thanks to Harry Sit # thefinancebuff.com for doing most of the work!!
More is possible through OFX, it's a complicated standard. Look to the specification for details.
You can also use GnuCash to see other promising settings.
This is using OFX 1.02, but Chase is now at 2.2
References
https://thefinancebuff.com/replacing-microsoft-money-part-5-ofx-scripts.html#comments
http://www.ofx.net/
http://www.ofxhome.com/
http://www.ofxhome.com/ofxforum/viewtopic.php?id=47456
https://rhye.org/post/parsing-ofx-leex/
since October 5, 2022, Chase disconnected ofx.chase.com and look like you have to go aggregators like Quicken/MD+ to get your data.
As HLE indicates, Chase has killed OFX/DirectConnect as of late Sept./early Oct. 2022. Here are some related articles:
"As of October 6th, 2022, Chase will no longer be supporting Direct Connect/OFX which includes 3rd-party bill pay. Along with some of the other larger financial institutions, Chase has moved to the Open Banking connection method for transaction importing. A link to an article that explains what Open Banking is all about is listed below."
https://www.banktivity.com/support/articles/banktivity-7/ofx-direct-connect-will-no-longer-be-supported-by-chase-as-of-october-6th-2022/
"Chase Bank is changing the way it connects with personal finance management solutions like Quicken. To keep Quicken connected to your Chase account you'll need to switch you connection method on or before September 26, 2022."
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916266/quicken-chase-announce-killing-link-to-chase-direct-connect-bill-pay
Possible solutions for Moneydance users:
http://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/online-banking/23881-chase-bank-accounts-no-longer-can-connect
It sounds like .QXF files contain the same/similar data as .OFX files and the downloading of such files may be scriptable. I will update this answer if I find out more.
I am using the Bigcommerce API to develop a small standalone application for a client. I store product information in a local database anytime I fetch products from Bigcommerce, to reduce latency and network load. However, products can change on Bigcommerce, and while it is acceptable for my application to show mildly outdated information, I will need to update my local cache at some point. My current plan is to do this by storing the original date I requested the product, after which I will need to perform another request to refresh the cache.
My question is, given a list of products (including their Bigcommerce IDs), is there a way to request updates to all of them through a single call to the Products Resource? I can make a request for each individual product by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products/{id}
I can also request all products within an unbroken ID range by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products?min_id={value}&max_id={value}
I am able to successfully call both of the above methods, and I can chain them together in loops to fetch all products. What I want to do is request multiple products with unrelated IDs in a single call. So, something like this:
//THIS IS NOT A REAL METHOD!
GET {api}/v2/products?id[]={value1}&id[]={value2}
Is there any way I can do this? Or is there another approach to solving this that I haven't considered? My main requirements are:
Minimal API requests. My application is small but my client's bigcommerce store is not, and I will be processing tens of thousands of products. I have limited CPU and network resources available, and I simply cannot process that many requests.
Scalable. As I said, my client's store is large, and growing. I need a solution whose overhead scales at a manageable rate with number of products.
Note: my application is a small web application written in PHP running on a Linux shared hosting environment. It is a back of house system which will likely only be used by single user at a time, during standard business hours. I haven't tagged the question with PHP because my question is about the API, which is language agnostic.
One approch can be.
First get all products from BigCommerce using simple products call.
Set some interval time to get updated product list.
You can use min_date_modified and max_date_modified OR min_date_created and max_date_created in products API call to get updated products details.
I want to perform rigrous testing on Payment Gateway(2checkout) and Pay Pal. For testing, I need to simulate a large number of successful, failed and halted transactions (transaction stopped due to system crash/reboot). But I don't want to make actual payments.
1. Is there any way I can make a test transaction on payment gateway, using fake card numbers or something else.
2. What are the possible advance testing scenarios for Payment Gateway testing?
For example:
Changing the amount, unmask CVV or card from Inspect
element.
List item
There are two options :
Using the PayPal Sandbox (Application Testing), or
Using Dependancy Injection (Unit Testing).
Both would work but I would suggest a Dependancy Injection approach. Assuming you have a separate object that only interacts with PayPal and then other objects that do your actual application logic (and error handling, etc) then you can just create a dummy version of the PayPal interaction object (that always returns true, or conditionally returns false, whatever) and then test your various application classes in detail.
I would suggest you only one solution, look at this Git PayPal-Android SDK and go through the README.md file. Last link tells you how to create a sandbox PayPal account to create dummy transactions across your sandboxed account developer account.
If you have doubts, you can refer Part 1 and Part 2 of AndroidHive tutorial for this.
Has anyone used Commission Junction's Product Catalog Search API for searching/fetching local deals? (BuyWithMe and KGBDeals post their deals to CJ)
There is a Yipit clone out there which uses this API. This clone was unable to categorize deals properly based on location. I was supposed to fix this issue. The problem I saw is: API's response does not contain location/city info. Therefore, deals cannot be categorized based on cities. This basically kills the purpose of local deals.
I am looking for advice from anyone who has done similar work using CJ API. May be I am missing something.
OneBigPlanet has an All-In-One API filled with all affiliate networks and daily deal providers for U.S & Canada
If you are going to use a deal aggregator API for your site/blog, you may want to take a look at this one as well.
SideBuy has recently released its version 1 API which lets the user (like yourself) connect to its comprehensive set of daily deals using several parameters to fully customize the listings. I suggest you check it out and get in touch in SideBuy's site if you need further assistance.
Disclaimer: I work for sidebuy.com.
What would be best practice for the following situation. I have an ecommerce store that pulls down inventory levels from a distributor. Should the site, for everytime a user loads a product detail page use the third party API for the most up to date data? Or, should the site using third party APIs and then store that data for a certain amount of time in it's own system and update it periodically?
To me it seems obvious that it should be updated everytime the product detail page is loaded but what about high traffic ecommerce stores? Are completely different solutions used for that case?
In this case I would definitely cache the results from the distributor's site for some period of time, rather than hitting them every time you get a request. However, I would not simply use a blanket 5 minute or 30 minute timeout for all cache entries. Instead, I would use some heuristics. If possible, for instance if your application is written in a language like Python, you could attach a simple script to every product which implements the timeout.
This way, if it is an item that is requested infrequently, or one that has a large amount in stock, you could cache for a longer time.
if product.popularityrating > 8 or product.lastqtyinstock < 20:
cache.expire(productnum)
distributor.checkstock(productnum)
This gives you flexibility that you can call on if you need it. Initially, you can set all the rules to something like:
cache.expireover("3m",productnum)
distributor.checkstock(productnum)
In actual fact, the script would probably not include the checkstock function call because that would be in the main app, but it is included here for context. If python seems too heavyweiaght to include just for this small amount of flexibilty, then have a look at TCL which was specifically designed for this type of job. Both can be embedded easily in C, C++, C# and Java applications.
Actually, there is another solution. Your distributor keeps the product catalog on their servers and gives you access to it via Open Catalog Interface. When a user wants to make an order he gets redirected in-place to the distributor's catalog, chooses items then transfers selection back to your shop.
It is widely used in SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) branch.
It depends on many factors: the traffic to your site, how often the inventory levels change, the business impact of displaing outdated data, how often the supplers allow you to call their API, their API's SLA in terms of availability and performance, and so on.
Once you have these answers, there are of course many possibilities here. For example, for a low-traffic site where getting the inventory right is important, you may want to call the 3rd-party API on every call, but revert to some alternative behavior (such as using cached data) if the API does not respond within a certain timeout.
Sometimes, well-designed APIs will include hints as to the validity period of the data. For example, some REST-over-HTTP APIs support various HTTP Cache control headers that can be used to specify a validity period, or to only retrieve data if it has changed since last request.