Overview

The System Foundation Classes (SFC) COM Edition is one of the easiest of the APIs to use. By leveraging Microsoft COM technology, you can use this API in your development environment of choice. As long as your environment fully supports COM, then this API will allow you to integrate market data into that application very easily. Note that The SFC product uses SSL/MarketFeed to communicate with the platform and deliver real-time access to market data. MarketFeed data is delivered in FID/Value pair format. SFC DOES NOT have ability to access to richer content delivered by Open Message Model (OMM) message.
The SFC-COM Edition provides an easy to use API that integrates well with the Microsoft development tools and will increase your developer productivity.

Solutions with the SFC-COM Edition are definitely not limited to ActiveX controls! The COM Edition allows you to access real-time data from applications developed with COM-enabled environments such as Visual Basic, Microsoft Office, Active Server Pages, Visual C++, Visual J++, Delphi, dynamic HTML and VBScript.

The SFC-COM API allows customers to use the same programming interfaces to subscribe and contribute to data on the LSEG Real-Time Distribution System (RTDS) and Data Feed directly. Applications that use the COM Edition can communicate with multiple systems simultaneously. This is important because applications may need to access data on multiple systems as firms migrate to RTDS. Examples provided in the developers kit show you how to write applications once that can be deployed anywhere.

Key Features

SFC COM can connect to the following infrastructure:

RTDS

• Real-Time Advanced Distribution Server
• Real-Time Advanced Distribution Hub

Data Feed

Note: SFC COM is able to connect to multiple infrastructures at the same time

Users of SFC COM can write applications to do the following:

Subscription Application

• Ability to subscribe to Record and its events (e.g. initial image, updates, correction and close tick)
• Ability to subscribe to Snapshot Record
• Ability to subscribe to Chain (a sequence list of records) and its sub-chain records
• Ability to subscribe to Page (either ANSI or QForm formats)
• Ability to subscribe to TS1 (stands for Time Series 1, which provides historical record data of market activity)
• Ability to subscribe to News and Headlines (via record object)
• Ability to subscribe to Time and Sales information (via record objects)

Publication Application

• Ability to publish data using record-based object (records, chains, time and sales, time series, and news) to the infrastructure or direct subscriber application

Contributions

• Ability to contribute data to the infrastructure (value-added servers, contributions server or a service that accepts inserts) and get a contribution result (pass or fail). Contributions can be entitled via the LSEG Real-Time Data Access Control System (DACS)

General Capabilities

• Support thread-safe by virtue of Microsoft COM
• Ability to cache data in memory (for fast access by the application)
• Ability to notify data quality via state (OK, stale, gets recovered, no longer available)
• Ability to simplify various event types from the infrastructure to map to SFC callback methods and states
• Ability to provide the high-level models for various data types (record, time-series, and pages)
• Ability to perform data recovery from data stream interruption
• Ability to maintain item watchlist
• Ability to perform queue of requests
• Ability to handle ripple fields automatically
• Provide a Service Pool for service state information management
• Provide a cache for fields and enumerations definitions
• Provides a programmatic configuration interface.
• Support multilingual using RMTES

Data Entitlements

• Support local and remote DACS entitlements
• Ability to perform subject-based and content-based entitlements on subscriptions, contributions, and publications
• Ability to publish DACS information

Benefits

• Leverage existing infrastructure.
• Leverage existing data sources
• Language independent
• Object-oriented programming
• Provide data models which represent the fundamental financial information
• Provide interfaces which represent data delivery mechanisms and processes

Product Content

The SFC-COM Edition contains the following components:

• COM Edition Libraries
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• PDF documentation (Developers Guide)
• HTML Help documentation (Developers Reference Documentation)
• HTML documentation (Redistributable Guide)
• Sample code and tutorials (VB, VB.Net, Excel, ActiveX, C#, and more!)