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Developer tools

Overview

FA’s Developer tools provide you with tools and instructions that enable you to extend FA Platform. These tools and instructions allow your developers to customize, automate and extend FA Platform beyond the standard features, and integrate it with other systems.

Functionality

The availability of developer tools depends on your plan, and therefore certain features listed below are limited accordingly. For more information, refer to the Customizability section.

Make customized reports and data analyses based on the data available in FA

  • Create custom client reports - you can use the fully-integrated reporting tool to create new report templates with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. FA Platform embeds jsreport designer, an online report-building tool, which allows you to develop custom reports of various file formats (PDF, XLSX, etc.) that your users can generate directly from FA.

  • Make custom data analysis - you can analyze your data with the help of Python libraries like pandas, plotly and pyfolio. FA Platform embeds Jupyter Notebook, a tool that allows you to perform various data analytics and manipulation tasks through on-the-fly Python scripting.

Extend the user interface and data fields

  • Add tabs and data fields for contacts, portfolios and securities - custom profiles help you extend standard UI to collect, store, and view the data entered by the user. For example, you can create a custom profile to store ESG values on security or to store client-specific information on contacts. A custom profile is displayed as a tab that you can tailor to your needs and show for contacts, portfolios, or securities. A tab can contain components, such as text fields, drop-down menus, and date fields. Profiles are constructed with Vaadin design layouts and components.

Create and automate workflows

  • Automate recurring tasks through business rules - a business rule automatically triggers one or more consequences whenever an object is modified in FA and meets conditions defined in the rule. For example, you can set a rule to change a trade order's status when it receives tags indicating a successful validation. FA Platform incorporates Drools business rule engine, which allows you to deploy your custom rules by uploading Excel-based decision tables. 

  • Streamline working with FA through custom processes - with custom processes, you can improve workflows by eliminating unnecessary manual steps. For example, an onboarding process can automatically prompt the client for information, validate it, and, upon successful validation, create a new contact in FA. FA Platform incorporates Flowable modeler, which lets you design business processes to implement in external applications, and Form.io form builder, which lets you create form designs that can be rendered in external applications.

Build integrations with other systems

  • Route data from and to the FA Platform through integrations - you can integrate FA Platform with other systems and applications via files and message transfers. FA Platform embeds Apache Camel, an open-source integration framework that provides routing and mediation capabilities. With Camel, you can create integration flows to connect the FA Platform with other systems.

  • Manipulate data through GraphQL APIs - FA Platform's APIs allow you to manipulate data from the FA Platform using a simple and intuitive query language. This allows you to retrieve data that you need while reducing the number of API calls. FA Platform’s API implementation is based on GraphQL, a query language and runtime for APIs, which is designed for flexible and efficient data fetching and editing.