python-ibapi-stable 10.30.1

Python IB API

Understanding Code Organization and Functionality

This section provides insights into how the TWS API library is structured, how messages are received and sent, and how to interact with the Wrapper class for handling incoming messages. Understanding these concepts will help you effectively utilize the TWS API for your trading automation needs.

A couple of things/definitions/conventions:

• a low level message is some data prefixed with its size
• a high level message is a list of fields separated by the NULL character; the fields are all strings; the message ID is the first field, the come others whose number and semantics depend on the message itself
• a request is a message from client to TWS/IBGW (IB Gateway)
• an answer is a message from TWS/IBGW to client

How the code is organized:

• comm module: has tools that know how to handle (eg: encode/decode) low and high level messages
• Connection: glorified socket
• Reader: thread that uses Connection to read packets, transform to low level messages and put in a Queue
• Decoder: knows how to take a low level message and decode into high level message
• Client:
  • knows to send requests
  • has the message loop which takes low level messages from Queue and uses Decoder to transform into high level message with which it then calls the corresponding Wrapper method
• Wrapper: class that needs to be subclassed by the user so that it can get the incoming messages

The info/data flow is:

• receiving:

  • Connection.recv_msg() (which is essentially a socket) receives the packets
    • uses Connection._recv_all_msgs() which tries to combine smaller packets into bigger ones based on some trivial heuristic
  • Reader.run() uses Connection.recv_msg() to get a packet and then uses comm.read_msg() to try to make it a low level message. If that can't be done yet (size prefix says so) then it waits for more packets
  • if a full low level message is received then it is placed in the Queue (remember this is a standalone thread)
  • the main thread runs the Client.run() loop which:
    • gets a low level message from Queue
    • uses comm.py to translate into high level message (fields)
    • uses Decoder.interpret() to act based on that message
  • Decoder.interpret() will translate the fields into function parameters of the correct type and call with the correct/corresponding method of Wrapper class

• sending:

  • Client class has methods that implement the requests. The user will call those request methods with the needed parameters and Client will send them to the TWS/IBGW.

Implementation notes:

• the Decoder has two ways of handling a message (essentially decoding the fields)

  • some message very neatly map to a function call; meaning that the number of fields and order are the same as the method parameters. For example: Wrapper.tickSize(). In this case a simple mapping is made between the incoming msg id and the Wrapper method:

  IN.TICK_SIZE: HandleInfo(wrap=Wrapper.tickSize),

  • other messages are more complex, depend on version number heavily or need field massaging. In this case the incoming message id is mapped to a processing function that will do all that and call the Wrapper method at the end. For example:

  IN.TICK_PRICE: HandleInfo(proc=processTickPriceMsg),