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CONTRIBUTING.md

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You are welcome to contribute to IBC. Here are some of the ways you can help:

  • correct mistakes or improve the quality of documentation: for example the User Guide or any of the text in the repository

  • contribute to the IBC User Group

  • suggest ways to make IBC better or more useful

  • submit pull requests to enhance or correct the code or the script files

Please bear in mind that IBC is a small, narrowly focussed project. Its only purpose is to automate aspects of TWS and Gateway operation that would otherwise require manual intervention at runtime. Note the following:

  • IBC is not a tool for configuring TWS: the user must configure the TWS settings as required through the means provided in TWS.

  • IBC is not a management mechanism for TWS, so it cannot be extended to provide for such things as restarting TWS after a failure. IBC and TWS run in the same process, and if one exits so does the other.

You may find the following guidelines helpful before starting work on a contribution to the project:

  1. Discuss it first: it's wise to raise an issue on the GitHub repository explaining what you propose to do. There may be reasons why your proposed change is unlikely to be accepted, or someone else may already be working on something similar, or it may even have been proposed and rejected before. You can also discuss suggestions for improvement on the IBC User Group.

  2. Cross-platform: in general changes must work on all supported platforms. In particular the Java source code should be cross-platform. Please make sure to test thoroughly on all platforms, and for both TWS and the Gateway, before submitting your pull request. If you can't do this, then please make clear in your pull request what testing you have done.

  3. Broad scope: improvements should be potentially useful to a significant proportion of the user base.

  4. Non-developer users: a lot of IBC users aren't developers. It must be easy for them to use any improvements. In particular, you should ensure that the configuration file and/or user guide adequately reflect changes.

  5. Backward compatibility: new versions should not force users of previous versions to change their configuration or script files (ie no surprises), unless this is absolutely essential. Obviously it may be necessary to introduce new settings into the configuration file or enhance the script files, but this should be done in such a way that if a user moves to the new version of IBC without making any changes their TWS/Gateway will continue to operate exactly as before.

  6. Respect IB T&C: changes must not be an infringement of the intent or provisions of IB's Terms and Conditions. For example, there should be no attempt to bypass the requirement to enter a code during logon for users enrolled in IB's security program.

  7. Style: please maintain the same style as the existing code unless you've discussed a refactor with the current maintainers via email or a GitHub Issue

How to build IBC

Apache Ant is required to build IBC.

The repository includes a build.xml file that defines the build process. This build process expects to find an IBC_BIN environment variable that specifies a folder containing the TWS jar files. This enables the compiler to locate the TWS and Gateway entrypoints to give an error-free compilation.

This folder could be in your TWS installation directory (for example C:\Jts\963\jars), or you could create a separate directory and copy the jar files into it (this would avoid problems should TWS be uninstalled, or a new version installed). Note that it doesn't matter which version of TWS you use: package and class names are always the same.

If you're using an IDE, such as NetBeans or Eclipse, to produce a modified version of IBC, you'll find it helpful to set the IBC_BIN environment variable permanently.

If you compile directly from the command line then depending on which shell you're using you may be able to prefix the command with setting the environment variable on the same line. However it's probably still preferable to set this permanently, rather than type it out each time you build.

Note that the ver property in the build.xml is used in generating the file names for the distribution ZIP files, and is also put in the version file which is used by the script files.