Mdbnomics for Octave

Dears,

I have been trying to test mdbnomics with Octave (using a branch “octave_fix” from the mdbnomics repository) since I wanted to spread the use of mdbnomics to colleagues who do not have Matlab licenses.

Unfortunately I have not been successful in replicating the behavior I get using Matlab. It seems that something goes wrong with webread.m when restful_service is invoked.
Are you aware of such issues, or in your opinion Octave should be fully compatible with mdbnomics?

Many thanks.

@MichelJuillard may be able to answer that.

Thanks @giovanma75, we weren’t aware of the problem. We are going to investigate and hopefully fix it

All the best

Thanks a lot. Just some background info to could help you.

  1. I used the octave-fix branch; [I checked the master branch as well with no success]
  2. I am using Octave 7.2.0;
  3. in the function initialize_mdbnomics (), line 53 I had to comment the logical OR statement i.e. I have
    if (isoctave && octave_ver_less_than(‘6’)) %|| matlab_ver_less_than(‘8.5’)
    because matlab_ver_less_than was causing an error;
  4. the error message I receive is:
    error: Could not fetch data from URL: https://api.db.nomics.world/v22/series?observations=1&series_ids=Eurostat/ext_st_
    ea19sitc/M.EA19.IMP.TRD_VAL_SCA.EA19.TOTAL&offset=0 because:
    error: called from
    fetch_series_page at line 49 column 5
    iter_series_info at line 42 column 19
    fetch_series_by_api_link at line 51 column 64
    fetch_series at line 119 column 4
    fetchdata_octave at line 70 column 33

Thanks again

@giovanma75 I have fixed the compatibility of mdbnomics.m for Octave v7.2 I couldn’t check Octave v6.4.0 that is required to work with Dynare on Windows. Please, tell me if there is a problem.

@MichelJuillard thank you!
I tried with the new master branch. Still, it crashes on line 93 of webread.m returning in ME.message ’ restful_service: SSL connect error’
I tried webread for reading other webpages -not dbnomics related- from Octave, and it seems to work.

I wonder if there are some extra Octave configurations to be done beforehand to let Octave accessing dbnomics…

Which version of Octave are you using? Which OS?
Can you try simply
webread("https://api.db.nomics.world")

I am using GNU Octave Version: 7.2.0 (hg id: 6c1e310b2230) on Windows 10 .
I get the same error:
webread(“https://api.db.nomics.world”)
error: restful_service: SSL connect error
error: called from
webread at line 93 column 14

When I do that on my Windows 10 machine with Octave 7.2 , I get

webread("https://api.db.nomics.world")
ans = {
  "v22": {
    "href": "/v22"
  },
  "latest": {
    "href": "/latest"
  }
}

Thanks @jpfeifer that is what is expected. @giovanma75, I suspect a weird interaction between Octave webread and the proxy at your office… Can you try from home?

Ok issue resolved. At home it works ( although it populates the command window with output, I guess that using semicolon it is not enough in Octave to suppress output to be written in the command window, I need to learn Octave, I guess).
On monday I will have IT people check what is going wrong from the office.
Many thanks @MichelJuillard and @jpfeifer for your help and your work, and sorry for wasting some of your time!
Best,
Massimo