Some details on the fix for the smfGetYahooPortfolioView (YPV since I don't like typing that much!)
The Yahoo data was still there, but it was blocked unless you were on
their site. If you went to https://finance.yahoo.com/ and then went to MyPortfolio, you could select the data for any stocks you added to your portfolio. The API that people have been using the last number of years for Yahoo is not a supported public API. It is in place for Yahoo's web pages to fetch the data to display on their web pages. However, some people have been using these unsupported APIs to get market data... and the SMF Add-In is one such example. It will retrieve close to 90 data elements in relation to the data provided on the Portfolio View page.
When Yahoo changed the API to require authentication, it was very disappointing (I did hear some stronger words used) to many people. I did get almost all of those data elements working with the RCHGetElementNumber funtion, but the problem with that function was it made so many calls to Yahoo's pages to get the elements for each ticker. That was the main reason to move people to use the YPV function... it could be array entered into Excel and then it would retrieve all the requested elements for all the requested tickers in ONE CALL to Yahoo and return all that data in JSON format. Then the VBA module could parse all the data out and insert it into the Excel sheet.
One of the members, Bruce, found some info on retrieving the crumb info
from yahoo and while I was working on that, Tony (another member of the group) put together the
fix while I went to get some sleep... procrastination wins again!
So now smfGetYahooPortfolioView has an additional parameter
internally for calling RCHGetWebData which really just calls
smfGetWebPage. That calls RCHGetURLData when then in the case of
the new fix, calls a new function RCHGetURLData4. That new
function calls another new function called getYahooCookieCrumb
that gets and stores the cookie and crumb data for the resulting
calls. This allows the add-in to fetch the data by making the web
page think it has been authorized to access it as an online user
would be.
NOTE:
Even though I added over 100 new elements to the RCHGetElementNumber function, only use it for when you need a very few items. For spreadsheets of lots of data, use the YPV function as an ARRAY ENTERED FORMULA.
If you want reliable real time data for many many tickers and plan to keep it up to date all day long, please read Yahoo's rules on data usage and look at getting a streaming data feed. If people abuse the data from Yahoo, they will continue to make changes with absolutely no notice to curtail the unwelcome traffic!
