Custom Application COM API Upgrades

COM API Overview

The COM APIs are older APIs that were initially delivered with 3000 Xtra Terminals and then Eikon. They provided access to a broad set of content and capabilities in Eikon. The COM API covers a large range of functionalities, as shown in this article.

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has three API Families based on this technology (collectively called the COM APIs' Family):

1. (Deprecated) COM APIs for use in customer applications
2. (Deprecated) System Foundation Classes (SFC) - COM
3. (Deprecated) COM APIs for use in Microsoft Office

For information on how to update your workflow away from Excel-related COM APIs do not hesitate to navigate through the parts relevent to your workflow above, ranging from AdfinXRtLib (rtx.dll) to AdxRtContribute.dll.

Upgrading away from COM APIs

Target Audience

This product page, and the migration material below only pertains to people using 32-bit COM APIs. If you are using Python, .NET, or Typescript, this does not involve you. If you are using VBA, it very well may.

The COM APIs are feature-complete and no new development work is being done on them. This means that new datasets and capabilities will not be available to users of these APIs. FOr access to such new capabilities, please migrate to Workspace.

You can check if your VB6 code uses any Eikon COM API components similarly to in Excel, by opening your Excel file’s Visual Basic editor and checking the referenced VBA libraries; i.e.:

Step 1: Press Alt+F11 which opens the VB editor

Step 2: Navigate to ‘Tools’ in the top menu ribbon and select References…’:

Step 3: Check for any of the Eikon COM API libraries:

Upgrade Guide

Before reading up on proccesses to upgrade away from COM, please note that Workapce does not support COM; if you are upgrading to using Workspace (e.g.: from Eikon), you ought to update your codebase before upgrading to Workspace.

If, up to now, you were only using the Eikon Data API (EDAPI) or one of the Refinitiv Data Libraries (formally known as RDP Libraries), then you were not using COM APIs, and there is no need for COM-related migrations as these APIs all work with Workspace as expected.

If you are using COM APIs in Microsoft Office (e.g.: Excel), we advise migrating to Python using XLwings or similar packages; you can do so by following the steps outlined in the article "Migrating COM API calls to Python" and also the (i) "How to integrate Financial Data from Refinitiv Data Platform to Excel with Xlwings - Part 1"  or (ii) "How to integrate Financial Data from Refinitiv Data Platform to Excel with Xlwings - Part 2" articles on using Python with Excel through the use of XLWings. Some of you may be aware of the latest beta.

If you were using COM APIs outside of Microsoft Office (e.g.: Excel), you can migrate towards using any of the Refinitiv Data Libraries with .Net, TypeScript or Python. You can migrate using Python by following the steps outlined in the article "Migrating COM API calls to Python".

Upgrade from Eikon to Workspace: The COM APIs will not be available in Workspace - so to take advantage of the best desktop experience you would need to migrate to our more modern web-based APIs - which are much better and work with modern scripting environments such as Python - one of the most popular language ecosystems used in finance. All the Python code below works in Codebook too! You can try it out as outlined in this Tutorial Video. We will use the Refinitiv Data Library (RD Library). To learn more about the Refinitiv Data Library for Python please join the Refinitiv Developer Community. By registering and logging into the Refinitiv Developer Community portal you will have free access to a number of learning materials like:

• Quick Start guides,
• Tutorials,
• Documentation

including the ability to ask questions on our Q&A forums and much more. We created a tag for you to use on the Q&A to indentify you specific migration needs.