CurrCon Currency Converter Manual

The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency, e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees… CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser and Java version 1.6 or later, preferably 1.7.0_17. If you can’t see the prices in your local currency, Troubleshoot

View the latest version of this manual online at http://mindprod.com/applet/currcon.manual.html.

Introduction	Displaying Exchange Rates
Benefits	Updating the Exchange Rates
Disadvantages	FX Sources
Shopping Carts	Comparison of CurrCon with Oanda FxCommerce
How It Works	Configuring
Details of the Applet Tags	Daily Procedure
Examples Using Different Show Parameters	Manual Procedure
Displaying Large Amounts	Costs
Details of the show Parameter	Links
Macros

Introduction

CurrCon stands for Currency Converter.

The currency converter lets you display prices/amounts in the native currency of the visitors to your website. The currency converter automatically selects the default currency to display based on the locale country setting of the browser. It currently supports 169 different currencies.

The CurrCon Currency Converter is available with Java source to download.

In other words, Americans automatically see American prices and Canadian see Canadian prices and the Dutch see Euros. Viewers can optionally view the prices on the page in another currency. Changing any currency selector on the page instantly changes all the prices on the page to that currency.

Unlike most currency converters, with this one, the user does not enter amounts to be converted. The values come from your web page. All prices on your web pages are instantly displayed in the user’s favourite currency without him having to do anything.

Benefits

It lets you sell to an international market on the web. You quote prices in your native currency, and CurrCon deals with automatically converting all the prices on a page to the user’s favoured currency.
If the user wants, he can flip all the prices on the page instantaneously into any other currency. Unfortunately, that setting is not remembered when the user flips to another page. It reverts back to his native currency.
If you write essays that mention amounts of money, you can use CurrCon so that all these amounts are automatically converted to the currency the reader is most familiar with. That ensures your readers fully understand what you are saying.
I am working on a JSP-version of CurrCon that will not require the clients to install Java. It will require you to serve the website from a JSP (Java Server Pages) Servlet womb. and it will not allow the users to select the currency instantly.

Disadvantages

The users must have the Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed to view the international prices. Otherwise they will just see the original price. See installing Java.
The user must have his country properly configured in the control panel. Otherwise he will see the default US prices, rather than his local currency, until he selects the currency for the page.
If you want to customise CurrCon, e.g. change the list of currencies presented, change the colours, update your own exchange rates, you will need to install the Java JDK, ANT and genjar. This requires basic knowledge of Java programming.
The <applet tags to invoke the CurrCon Applet are verbose. The alternative terser <!-- macro CurrCon tags require the use of the complex htmlmacros package. For a fee, I could prepare you a stripped down simple macro processor.

Shopping Carts

If you have a shopping cart website, CurrCon is probably not what you want. Why?

The prices CurrCon displays are usually based on today’s exchange rates. You have to explain to your customers that the prices displayed are approximate. The prices the customer actually pays are based on the credit card company, PayPal, your bank etc., perhaps using rates several days hence or previous, or with hefty exchange rate commissions built-in. The price depends on the form of payment! The discrepancies could enrage your customers.
To use CurrCon, your customers must have a recent Java installed. This is not a problem for a technical audience, but will frighten off computer novices.

What you want is shopping cart software than runs on you server that handles multiple currencies that knows the exchange rates charged by your various credit card companies and banks. It will not require your customers to have Java installed. Unfortunately, I cannot at this point recommend any particular package. You might find one by discovering a website what handles multiple currencies well and asking them what software they use.

I am working on a server-side version of CurrCon that does not need Java, however it still would not be suitable for use with shopping carts since it would not be integrated into the shopping cart software. Perhaps some shopping cart vendors will merge it into their products when I release it.

How It Works

Unlike most currency converters, this one requires no server-side support. It does not require JavaScript. However, it does require Java in the user’s browser. Each value displayed is a tiny Java Applet. All that is required is you upload the currcon.jar file to your website. It contains the latest exchange rates in compressed form and also the Java code to do the conversions.

If you change the currency choice anywhere on a page, automatically all the other displays on the page instantly follow suit. Try using the up down arrow to cycle through the possible currencies. Try it below:

$0.00 USD

To get a display like this:

$30.00 USD

You need to code some HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that looks like this:

<!-- macro CurrCon C$AcN USD 30.00 -->

which expands to:

Normally you might display something simpler such as this:

$30.00 USD

To get that you code some HTML like this:

<!-- macro CurrCon cA USD 30.00 -->

which expands to this:

or even simpler like this:

$30.00 USD

To get that you code some HTML like this:

<!-- macro CurrCon A USD 20.00 -->

which expands to this:

Details of the Applet Tags

Typically to produce a CurrCon display, you need something like this in your HTML :

You may also hand code the <applet tags yourself, without using the complexity of a macro preprocessor. What is all this gobbledgook? Happily most of it is just boilerplate. You can copy/paste standard templates and just change the amount.

<applet says this is a Java Applet.
archive=currcon.jar is the name of the file where the exchange rates are kept.
code=com.mindprod.currcon.CurrCon.class is the name of the Java program that does the conversions.
width=120 tells how much screen width real estate in pixels to use. You must calculate the width based on how many elements you choose to include is your show parameter: c=52 C=30 N=120 A=70 $=10. More on that later.
height=20 The height of the display in pixels.
alt=30.00 USD What to display if the user does not have Java.
<param name=currency value=USD> the currency used to express the base amount, most commonly USD for US Dollars, CAD for Canadian dollars, or EUR for Euros or GBP for British pounds sterling. See this complete list. Every price on the page can be expressed in a different base currency if you want.
<param name=amount value=30.00> specifies the amount in some base currency.
<param name=geom value=4>. This is used to ensure all the various CurrCon programs are using the same version of the geometry of how big each field should be.
<param name=show value=cA> Which types of display you want to see: any combination or order of the letters: c C N A P $. More on what they mean later.
</applet> marks the end of information needed to generate the display.

Examples Using Different Show Parameters

CurrCon Display Variations
How a $70 USD Price is displayed	Format Letter Combination
$30.00 USD	$AcN
$30.00 USD	$A
$30.00 USD	$Ac
$30.00 USD	c$A
$30.00 USD	C$A
$30.00 USD	$AC
$30.00 USD	A
$30.00 USD	N
$30.00 USD	C
$30.00 USD	c
$1,200,000.00 USD	cA
$1,200,000.00 USD	cP

Displaying Large Amounts

CurrCon Display of Large Amounts
$1,000.00 USD	1000 USD
$1,000,000.00 USD	1,000,000 one million USD
$1,200,000.00 USD	1,200,000 1.2 million USD
$10,000,000.00 USD	10,000,000 10 million USD
$12,000,000.00 USD	12,000,000 12 million USD
$1,000,000,000.00 USD	1,000,000,000 one billion USD
$12,000,000,000.00 USD	12,000,000,000 12 billion USD
$12,300,000,000.00 USD	12,300,000,000 12.3 billion USD
$199,300,000.00 USD	19,930,000,000 19.93 billion USD, note rounding
$19,000,000,000.00 USD	19,000,000,000 19 billion USD
$19,000,000,000,000.00 USD	19,000,000,000,000 19 trillion USD

You can suppress the short forms by using code P instead of code A.

Details of the show Parameter

Letter	What it looks like	Width in Pixels	Purpose
c	$0.00 USD	54	Allows user to change the currency for all displays on the page. This was increased from 52 pixels on 2010-02-04 to handle wide abbreviations such as KRW.
C	$0.00 USD	32	Compactly let’s user know what Currency is being used with a three-letter abbreviation, as a display that cannot directly changed.
N	$0.00 USD	130	Spells out the currency Name being used in easy-to-understand words.
A	$30.00 USD	76	Show the Amount converted into the user’s favoured currency. If there is no A in the show parameter, you need not bother specifying the currency and amount parameters.
P	$1,900,030.00 USD	108	Show the Precise amount, converted into the user’s favoured currency. Does not use any of the short forms for large amounts.
$	$30.00 USD	30	Put a lead $/euro symbol etc. on the following amount.

You can use any combination of the letters c C N A P $, in any order, leaving any out. You need to add up the widths of each piece and put that in as the width of the entire Applet. Unfortunately CurrCon can’t add them up for you, since by the time it starts the amount of screen real estate is already fixed. For example:

Yuck, that’s too Complicated! Macros to the Rescue

Don’t give up yet. There are several possible alternatives to manually coding the <APPLET tags.

If you want, for no extra cost, I will write you an Java Application to help with the show letter symbols. You fill in the blanks to select which elements you want to display, the amount, the currency, and the nesting level and it both shows you what it will look like, and pokes the equivalent HTML <APPLET tags into clipboard where you can paste them into your HTML document. I have not written this HTML generator since no one has asked for it yet. It could have it ready in a day or two.
You can just embed the short form static HTML macros in your HTML and have them expanded for you. It this how I handle them on my own website. You can see the macros I use on the my own website by using view source.
```

```
expands to:
The tricky part in doing it manually is getting the right number of ../../ in the archive jar name, and figuring out the exact width and height.
I run the macro processor on all my files just prior to any upload. I expand the macros, generate an index, compact the HTML, and provide a mirror website via the Replicator. The macro generator stripped down to handle just CurrCon macros is optionally included, but not the Compactor or the Replicator. I have not prepared the stripped down version of the macro generator since no one has asked for it yet. It could have it ready in a day or two at no extra cost.
You could also generate the <APPLET tags with JSP, servlets or ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals). I have not yet written code to do that, but I could work with you on developing it. I have no ASP experience at all, so all I could do in provide you equivalent Java code. You might wonder why bother with CurrCon in that case. Why not just generate the page with the conversions pre-expanded? The advantage of using CurrCon is the user can switch every price on the page with a click of a mouse. He does not have to wait for a whole new page to be generated and delivered. However, you could do it that way, cannibalising some of CurrCon’s logic, giving you the advantage of no reliance of a working Java in the client machine.
You could simplify the <APPLET tags by creating a special version of CurrCon that used your usual Show tags and base currency as the default. Further you could leave out the material for-non-Java users, and put that somewhere on your page once.

Displaying Exchange Rates

You can also use CurrCon to display exchange rates like this:

1 Euro is	€1.00 EUR	$0.00 USD
1 British pound Sterling is	1.00 GBP
1 US dollar is	$1.00 USD
1 Canadian dollar is	$1.00 CAD
1 New Zealand dollar is	1.00 NZD

Updating the Exchange Rates

Exchange rates change daily. I update the exchange rate tables daily and post them on my website embedded at http://mindprod.com/applet/currcon.jar shortly aftter 1 PM Eastern time, when the bank of Canada posts them. You are free to download the latest versions every day and upload them to your website. Alternatively, you can use your own source and add the massaged serialized data to the jar yourself. I have written code to do this the Bank of Canada, the source I use on my own website. I could write you an automated extractor for other sources. Most likely I would charge $50.00 USD , but it depends on the complexity. In any case, I give you a fixed price ahead of time. It is not hard to do yourself using the two sample extractors I have written as models.

FX (Exchange Rate) Sources

You need to pick a source for your exchange rates.

Foreign Exchange Rate Currency Sources
Source	Format	Number of Currencies	Format	Notes
Bank of Canada	CSV (Comma-Separated Value)	57	CSV downloadable file, very convenient. Relative to Canadian dollar.	Official Government source, comes out 1 PM EST (Eastern Standard Time) each day. Has last 7 days of rates. This is the source I use at mindprod.com. Free. You can also pick them up indirectly already massaged into a jar file from the http://mindprod.com/applet/currcon.jar website each day.
Bank of Canada	PDF (Portable Document Format)	57	Relative to Canadian dollar.	Official Government source, comes out 1 PM EST each day. Has last 7 days of rates.
Bank of Canada	RSS	57	RSS feed. One for each country	Official Government source
oanda.com	html	193	Requires licencing the feed.	Makers of the FxCommerce product that competes with CurrCon. It is illegal to use this site to feed data into CurrCon by screenscaping or copying from the screen. Their lawyer explained this in series of emails. Apparently, it would be legal if either you or I signed a licence agreement with them and paid a fee to use a special feed they have. Oddly they even carry obsolete currencies, e.g. that of countries that have converted to the Euro. You manually select which currencies you want, then it sends you a list of the exchange rates in HTML or CSV embedded in an HTML page. It is free to use, so long as you don’t actually make practical use of the information, so you can experiment with it for free. If you curious about the history of how the US dollar (code USD) has been doing relative to the Canadian dollar (code USD), the Euro (code EUR) even the Iraqi Dinar (code IQD) see Oanda’s fxhistory. The US dollar is in deep trouble, but most Americans are unaware of what is happening. Money is fleeing America causing the value of the dollar to drop relative to other countries. The net effect is America has to pay more for imported goods which puts her still deeper in debt in a vicious spiral of debt.
University of BC	html	26	HTML table screenscrape	Updated each noon Pacific Time
US Federal Reserve Bank	html	25	text in columns screenscrape	Official government source.
CustomHouse	html	26	HTML table screenscrape	rates are one day behind.
Microsoft	html	15	HTML table screenscrape	Updated frequently
XE.com	text	68	as an email in columns surrounded by extraneous text.	Email would need to be extracted manually when it arrived. Xe is a commercial provider so you would need to licence the right to use these figures.
newspaper	print	?	you type them in daily using a csv file.	This is a lot of work. It is error prone. The main advantage is no issue of paying royalties.

Comparison of CurrCon with Oanda FxCommerce

Oanda made a similar product to CurrCon called FXCommerce, but I cannot find any mention of it any longer on their website. They seem to not only have discontinued it, but disavow it ever existing.

Feature	CurrCon	FxCommerce
Requires special Code on the server?
Automatically selects user’s currency
Requires user to have JavaScript enabled
Requires user to have Java enabled
Requires user to reload page to see prices?
Lets you control font, color etc. of prices with style sheets?
Includes daily feed of exchange rate changes?
Cost	free	$30.00 USD per month.
exists, and open source so it cannot ever be taken away from you.	Defunct

Configuring

You will likely need my help getting started. I am opening to creating custom versions of the program.

CurrCon itself free but if you need help installing or configuring CurrCon, I am available on a consulting basis for a fee. I will help you configure CurrCon for your needs. I need to know which technique you will use to generate the Applet tags and what source you plan to use for the exchange rates. I need to know what program you use to upload to your website.

To help you get started quickly, I need to know which currency choices you want to offer.

currency for the possible choices
other downloads

You can configure the files to restrict the currency choices and control the default currency for each country.

The list of choices is limited by both what your exchange rate source offers and by the list of currency descriptions. To deliberately leave out a country, remove its line from countrytocur.csv. To deliberately leave out a currency, remove its line from currencydetails.csv.

The currency details list looks like this, with columns for abbreviation, decimal places, Unicode currency symbol, description:

Key Files Used by CurrCon
File	Purpose
com\mindprod\currcon\countrytocur.csv	Country code to Currency code conversion lookup table. In other words, which currency do people use in each country?
com\mindprod\currcon\CurrCon.java	CurrCon Java Applet source. Uses the exchs.ser file prepared each day to display prices as an Applet embedded in HTML.
com\mindprod\currcon\currcon.jar	The jar containing the CurrCon java Applet and the exchs.ser digested daily exchange rates. It is a compact 13K for fast loading. It is freshly prepared each day with the new exchange rates and uploaded to the website. Alternatively, you can just borrow mine from my website if you have no customisation.
com\mindprod\currcon\CurrConAux.java	CurrConAux main Java program source. Prepares the exchs.ser digest of exchange rates each day from the bank of Canada file.
com\mindprod\currcon\currencydetails.csv	Details about each currency, its name, how many decimal places you use to display it, what symbol to use for the dollar sign if any.
com\mindprod\currcon\daily.bat	Run daily to prepare jar for uploading to the website.
com\mindprod\currcon\dailym.bat	Run daily to prepare jar for uploading to the website, if you handle your exchange rates manually..
com\mindprod\currcon\seven_day_exchange_en.csv	File downloaded each day to the C:\com\mindprod\currcon directory from the bank of Canada website http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/markets/csv/exchange_eng.csv containing the daily exchange rates for various countries with the currencies labelled using ISO (International Standards Organisation) 4217 codes.
com\mindprod\currcon\exchs.ser	The massaged and predigested exchange rates in a compact form ready for the CurrCon Applet. It is included in the currcon.jar prepared each day and uploaded to the website.
com\mindprod\currcon\manual.csv	Only used if you want to manually control the exchange rates. A list of currencies and their current exchange rates.

Daily Procedure

Once only, get a computer-savvy person (possibly me) to adjust the file daily.bat for you to customise it for your computer.
Any time after 1 PM Eastern time, when the Bank of Canada posts the new exchange rates, run daily.bat. It will download http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/markets/csv/exchange_eng.csv to the C:\com\mindprod\currcon directory. Then it will merge the various data files and produce a new currcon.jar file.
Upload com\mindprod\currcon\currcon.jar to your website.

If you see errors, most commonly it is the Bank of Canada changing, adding or deleting country codes. I will usually notice the problem within 24 hours and post a new version to handle the change. Sometimes it is a temporary problem, e.g. An exchange rate was not available for the Myanmar Kyat today.

Manual Procedure

If you want complete control of the exchange rates (perhaps to pad them with a fee, or to hold them more stable than they really are), you can run CurrCon in manual mode.

Once only, get a computer-savvy person to adjust the file dailym.bat for you to customise it for your computer, e.g, to use your favourite text editor.
Each day, or as often as you want to change the exchange rates, edit the file com\mindprod\currcon\manual.csv. It is a CSV file with one line per currency (and two fields per line) that you want to support. It would look something like this:
```
CAD,0.98473
EUR,1.57104
GBP,1.98306
USD,1.0
```
Use the upper case three letter codes for the currencies you want to support from the list in currencydetails.csv. The numeric value is the value of one unit of the currency in US dollars. The GBP (Great Britain Pound) and Euro will be greater than 1. The MXP Mexican peso will be less than 1. USD US dollars will be exactly 1. You need lines for the currencies you want to support, including USD. You can get the exchange rates from a newspaper or from one of the online sources.
Once only, prune out currencies you don’t want to support. There is no need to prune currencies you don’t want to support from the other files such as currencydetails.csv and countrytocurr.csv.
Run dailym.bat.
Upload com\mindprod\currcon\currcon.jar to your website.

Costs

CurrCon is free. It comes with source, and your right to modify it and use it throughout your company. I will help you get it going, but if you require modifications or extensive help, I will help you for a negotiated fee. Even someone with the most basic knowledge of Java should have no problem getting CurrCon working or doing minor customisations, like reducing the set of currencies supported. Since customising means running the Javac compiler and and ant script it is likely beyond the reach of a someone without Java experience, unless they use it unmodified.

Package	Version	Released	Licence	Language	Notes
CurrCon Currency Converter	4.5	2011-12-29	free	Java	❘ precis ❘ manual ❘ screenshot ❘ browse source repository for the current version of CurrCon Currency Converter. Currency converter for web pages. 2.3MB zip for CurrCon Currency Converter Java source, compiled class files, jar and documentation to run on your own machine as an Applet. Runs on any OS that supports Java e.g. W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W2008/W7-32/W7-64/W8-32/W8-64/Linux/LinuxARM/LinuxX86/LinuxX64/Ubuntu/Solaris/SolarisSPARC/SolarisSPARC64/SolarisX86/SolarisX64/OSX. First install the most recent Java. To install, extract the zip download with WinZip, (or similar unzip utility) into any directory you please, often J:\ — ticking off the use folder names option. To check out the corresponding source from the Subversion repository, use the TortoiseSVN repo-browser to access currcon source in repository with [Tortoise] Subversion client on wush.net/svn/mindprod/com/mindprod/currcon/. download ASP PAD XML program description for the current version of CurrCon Currency Converter. CurrCon Currency Converter is free. $1989.00 US donated so far. If the CMP utilities solved your problem, please donate a buck or two, or donate to one of the charities featured in the footer public service ads throughout the website and get a tax receipt. Full source included. You may even include the source code, modified or unmodified in free/commercial open source/proprietary programs that you write and distribute. Non-military use only.

Currcon overview
currency
currency codes
Currency Converter Student Project
downloading CurrCon
How to configure your country/currency in Vista
other downloads
today’s exchange rates

	available on the web at:	http://mindprod.com/applet/currcon.manual.html
	optional Replicator mirror of mindprod.com on local hard disk J:	J:\mindprod\applet\currcon.manual.html
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