Currency Conversion

Question

For building a Currency conversion function , we will be needing exchange rates on an hourly basis to be stored in SFDC. Is this going to be a manual task or we can automate the population of exchange rates? Does SFDC provide any out of the box functionality for currency conversion?

Answer 1

You can create a Apex job on hourly basis to fetch the exchange rate and store in a object as below.

CurrencyConverter is the class which fetch the conversion rate from yahoo and Store in a custom object called Rate. There are two fields one is Conversion_rate and Date. You can add more fields as required. I have used USD > INR conversion. You can update your currency in the URL parameter.

CurrencyConverterScheduler is the scheduler class which needs to be scheduled as per your requirement.

Apex Class - CurrencyConverter

global class CurrencyConverter{
    @future(callout=true)
    public static void convertCurrency(){
        Http httpProtocol = new Http();
        HttpRequest request = new HttpRequest();
        String endpoint = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20%2a%20from%20yahoo.finance.xchange%20where%20pair%20in%20%28%22USDINR%22%29&format=json&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys';
        request.setEndPoint(endpoint); 
        request.setMethod('GET');
        HttpResponse response = httpProtocol.send(request);
        JSONParser parser = JSON.createParser(response.getBody());
        String convRate = '';
        while (parser.nextToken() != null) {
            if ((parser.getCurrentToken() == JSONToken.FIELD_NAME) && 
                (parser.getText() == 'Rate')) {
                parser.nextToken();
                convRate = parser.getText();
            }
        }
        System.debug('convRate :'+convRate);       
        Rate__c rate = new Rate__c();
        rate.Conversion_rate__c = convRate;
        rate.Date__c = Date.today();
        insert rate;      
    }
}

Apex Class - CurrencyConverterScheduler

global class CurrencyConverterScheduler implements Schedulable {
    global void execute(SchedulableContext ctx){
        CurrencyConverter.convertCurrency();
    }
}

Answer 2

SFDC does not provide this functionality out of the box. There are apps in the AppExchange, however, that will do that. Please look for yourself, I don't have any experience with these myself.