BSRCH (Bloomberg Search)

[MarekOzana]

Hi,
Would somebody have time to implement BSRCH function? Example us case
BSRCH("COMDTY:NGFLOW")
It is commonly used for Fixed Income instrument screening.
Thank you for your time and help.
/Marek

[eddelbuettel]

Well, considering that

• I do not know what API function implements it
• A casual look at the developer guide does not reveal anything either
• We generally follow open source contribution principles: "he who has an itch gets to scratch it"

We are all busy professionals too, and hence unlikely to write this for you. If you want to take a stab, we can try to help. Or you can try to hire someone and we will try to help to get that work integrated.

[joel23888]

It seems clear that the functionality in the BSRCH Excel function is not supported by the BBG C++ API. I had a look through the developer's guide and cannot see how this would be possible.

[eddelbuettel]

Ahhh. Good find. Closing this as a consequence of that comment.

[n-e-w]

Incidentally, you can work around similar queries to extract elements from
known datasets by using some bds calls (though calling BSRCH is only
available if you're a Bloomberg employee -- at least when I tried to run on
my terminal?)

For example, let's say you want the top 10 holdings of an ETF -- a field in
the API which is "TOP_MUTUAL_FUND_HOLDINGS" -- you can call:

con <- Rblpapi::blpConnect()
Rblpapi::bds("SPY US Equity", "TOP MUTUAL FUND HOLDINGS")

This will return a data.frame of the top 10 holdings. You can then search
this data frame for the ticker or name of the security depending on what
you have to start with.

Could put this in a wrapper pretty easily if you know what bds dataset
your security name (rather than ticker) might appear in and then extract
it.

Just a thought.

[wmorgan85]

Basic BSRCH functionality has now been implemented in #111.

[eddelbuettel]

And as a courtesy I uploaded source and Windows release aka 3.2.* packages to the ghrr drat. The sequence

if (!require("drat")) install.packages("drat")     ## install if needed
drat::addRepo("ghrr")
install.packages("Rblpapi")                           

will install it as version 0.3.2.2 (which is the current version in the master branch). It may be a moment before this gets to CRAN so this provides a preview.