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Can Unity help me make a stock market App for android using Excel spreadsheets for data
Hi I was hoping to make some form of a charting application to put on the android market.(a free and a paid version hopefully) The only catch is i'm not sure what way is best to do this..So far ive found out that I can stream free data from yahoo, using excel. I was hoping Unity could help me develop a way that I could take that excel spreadsheet make some kind of database that would update accordingly for the users selected stocks ie Apple(APPL), by this i mean they'd have a portfolio. Next I would need some way to take the data and store it, so i can construct a graph, and then use the information to make inidcators like the 20,50,or 200 day moving averages.
I know a little java and C#, but ive been told that learning SQL would be vital to my goal... is there a way around this in Unity, or will i have to be pretty network savy to tackle this challenge
Thanks to anyone that can help
Answer by Bunny83 · Mar 20, 2012 at 04:49 PM
I guess you talk about Yahoo's CSV Stock Quote API? In this case it has nothing to do with excel. A CSV file is just a file with comma / character seperated values. It seems that this API isn't officially supported by Yahoo since it has some bugs. If you can live with them and with the fact that they may cancel their service at anytime, use it.
To store the data you have all possibilities. You can save them in a custom format in a file or use sqlite to create a local database file (at least i guess it should work on Android as well). You could even use CSV yourself to store the data locally.
So to answer your question: Yes you can use Unity for such an application, but keep in mind those free data services can be closed at any time.
Thanks so much I was hoping for an answer like that, but just to clarify if i used the CSV locally, do you mean on the android device that will be running it, or locally on my home server?
and although I do love my unity program, is there perhaps another program$$anonymous$$g engine that would be more suitable to my goals. and once I have the data whats the best way to manage it, in terms of making the graphs and presenting it in a gui.
plus i plan to upgrade to paid real time strea$$anonymous$$g in the future.. the free CSV from yahoo is just so i can figure out how to manipulate the data, so as long as yahoo doesn't shut down before 2012 i should be ok, but thanks for the warning :)
Thanks again and if anyone knows a tutorial that might help me, I would really appreciate it.. If I find a good one too Ill post it here for others, cheers!
Well, by locally i meant locally on the Android since you never mentioned a server, only your app. Well how to manage your data depends on the way you want to process them and what kind of data.
Like i said above i would propably use a SQLite database. It's lightweight, doesn't require a server and supports most SQL functions. If you want to use a webserver to store the data you have to do all the loading from Yahoo in PHP or any other serverside language. In this case you would use the SQL server installed on your webserver (propably $$anonymous$$ySQL).
The disadvantage of the webserver solution is, if the user doesn't have an internet connection he can't view the data at all since it's stored on your server.