One of the most interesting challenges I’ve had recently is the need to get data from a Bloomberg terminal on a trader’s desk into a Flex client. To make this magic happen, we need a couple of components:

1. An Adapter that connects to bloomberg and listens on a socket for a request from the Flex Client
2. A Flex connector that runs in the Flex application, makes a socket connection to the adapter, listens for data and passes it back to the application for presentation.

The structure looks something like this.

Example

To get this example to work you need Bloomberg running on gthe PC. Without this there is no data for the adapter to work on!

Step 1 - Install the Adapter

The Adapter is built in C# and packaged as a ClickOnce application here.

Step 2 - Run the Adapter

When you’ve installed it and executed it, you’ll see the console start up and a message indicating that it is listening on localhost port 2705. The important thing here is that none of the Bloomberg data leaves the workstation and the terms of the licence are therefore not broken

Step 3 - Check the connection is good

Once this is running, refresh this page and have a look at the Flex application below. It’s very straightforward. It simply takes a Bloomberg Ticker such as VOD LN Equity and returns the ISIN, Name, Bid & Ask.

The indicator light shows whether it has made a connection to the Adapter and whether it is receiving data. Red is bad. It indicates that a connection has not yet been made. Yellow is better, it shows that a connection has been made to the Adapter and that it’s waiting for data. Green is good. This indicates that data has been received.

Step 4 - Tap in a Ticker

When you’ve got the Yellow light, tap in a Ticker such as IBM US Equity and click on the refresh button. The ISIN, Name, Bid & Ask prices will instantly be populated thus proving the connection

Step 4 - Understand what’s happened