[Quickfix-developers] Component blocks

[Shepheard, T. (London) <Tob...@ml...>]

Hi all,

I'm using QuickFIX/J, though I think this may be applicable to the other
implementations I'm not sure.

What I'd like to do is write some helper methods to carry out certain
common actions based on component blocks. A typical example would be the
Instrument block, which appears in a number of guises:

QuoteRequest message - here it is part of a repeating group,
NoRelatedSym.=20
NewOrderSingle message - here it is part of the main NewOrderSingle
message

I'd love to be able to pass in an "Instrument" object to a method and do
my thing with it, but there doesn't seem to be any such object. Indeed,
the only way I could find to extract Instrument data from a common base
class was to treat is as a FieldMap object, which covers both Group and
Message types. This seems to mean using a format such as

fieldMap.getField(new UtcTimeStampField(TransactTime.FIELD)

Which is not very type-safe, as I'm just assuming the fieldMap will have
the Instrument block's fields, and is liable to break if anything
changes in the underlying data-dictionary. Is there a better way to do
this that is type-safe and reusable, regardless of the underlying
fieldMap type that the instrument block is a part of? I realise
component blocks have no "real" meaning, but they do provide a common,
logical construct that it seems  shame I can't leverage in a nice OO
way, especially considering the data dictionary contains all the
required data for generating such objects. If I am missing something,
please let me know :)

Regards,
Toby
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