Running the Portfolio Demo Sample Application¶

About the Portfolio Demo Use Case¶

The Portfolio demo is a financial application where users can actively create and manage a portfolio of stocks. Each portfolio contains a list of stocks, the number of shares purchased, and the price at which the shares were purchased. An overall value is maintained for each stock portfolio as well as the percentage of gain or loss compared to the original stock purchase prices for a portfolio.

The demo has a pricer utility that simulates an active feed of live stock market data. For each stock ticker symbol, the application tracks the current stock price and the historical market data (end-of-day price) for each stock for 100 days.

Running the Demo Web Application¶

Prerequisites

• The DataStax Community Edition package is installed using either the binary install or a packaged install (see Introduction to Apache Cassandra and DataStax Community Edition or Installing a Multiple Node Cluster).
• Your Cassandra cluster is configured and running.

1. You might need to configure the demo application to point to the correct Cassandra installation location. For example, if DataStax Community Edition is installed in a directory called datastax in your home directory:

   $ sed -i -e "s,/usr/share/cassandra,~/datastax,"
   ~/datastax/demos/portfolio_manager/bin/pricer
   

If you copy the above text, be sure to delete any extra spaces.

2. Go to the Portfolio Manager demo directory.

   Binary Installs: $ cd <install_location>/demos/portfolio_manager

   Packaged Installs: $ cd /usr/share/dse-demos/portfolio_manager

   Note

   You must run the pricer utility from a directory where you have write permissions (such as your home directory), or else run it as root or using sudo.

3. Run the pricer utility to generate stock data for the application. To see the available options:

   $ bin/pricer --help
   

4. To generate 100 days worth of historical data:

   If running on a single node cluster on localhost:

   bin/pricer -o INSERT_PRICES
   bin/pricer -o UPDATE_PORTFOLIOS
   bin/pricer -o INSERT_HISTORICAL_PRICES -n 100
   

4. Start the web service:

   $ cd <install_location>/demos/portfolio_manager/website
   $ java -jar start.jar &
   

5. Open a browser and go to:

   • http://localhost:8983/portfolio (if running on the local machine)
   • http://<webhost_ip>:8983/portfolio (if running remotely - specify the correct IP address of the remote server).

This open` the Portfolio Manager demo web application home page.

Exploring the Sample Data Model¶

The sample data for the demo application is contained in a Cassandra keyspace called PortfolioDemo.

In that keyspace are four column families:

• Portfolio - One row per portfolio where the column names are the stock ticker symbols and the column values are the current stock price.
• StockHist - One row per stock ticker symbol with (time-ordered) dates for the column names and column values are the end-of-day price for a particular day.
• Stocks - One row per stock ticker symbol with a static column name price and the column value is the current stock value.
• HistLoss - One row per stock ticker symbol where the column name is the worst date in the stock's history in the form of YYYY-MM-DD and the column value is the loss dollar amount.