[R-SIG-Finance] How to use RDCOMClient (RBloomberg 0.1-11) without Admin rights

[schubert]

I’m using RBloomberg since November on a Windows XP machine and it works 
very well. Now I had to install it on another Bloomberg machine which 
has the same hard- and software installation. But every time I tried to 
connect to Bloomberg over COM Api (RDCOMClient) - RGUI crashed. After 
searching a lot in the internet I found that a lot of people have 
problems to use RBloomberg (version with RDCOMClient) without 
administrator rights. Funny – because the user on the pc were the 
download worked also had no admin rights. Therefore I tested a lot with 
RDCOMClient and the Excel Examples and came to the conclusion that the 
problem isn’t a RBloomberg Problem – it’s only a problem with the 
RDCOMclient.


The problem can be tested with these lines of code (part of test2.R from 
RDCOMClient):

library(RDCOMClient)
xl <- COMCreate("Excel.Application")
xl[["Visible"]] <- TRUE # here - RGUI crashes!


RGUI.exe crashes after using/accessing a COM Object which was already 
created. Why?

After searching a lot in different forums and giving access-rights to 
the different directories (like R, RDCOMClient, Bloomberg/API) I didn’t 
came to a solution.

Only when I tried to read the source code of RDCOM-Client I discovered 
something strange. In some errorcase a log-file “RDCOM.err” will be 
created directly in the root directory of C:\

The Problem is that in most companies normal users do not have access 
rights to the root directory of C:\ and so the error log file can not be 
written (if it isn’t created) or changed (append with new text). In this 
case – RGUI crashes.

If an admin creates this file (if it doesn’t exists) and give the user 
full access (read, write, change) to this file, the RDCOMClient will 
work – at least it worked on my pc.

A better solution would be to change the source code of RDCOMClient in 
COMError.cpp – and change there the path from C:\\RDCOM.err to a 
location where the user is allowed to write/change files . e.g. a user 
directory.

I hope I can help other users with this information to use this great 
library on pc's without admin rights.

Best regards
Thomas Schubert

PS: By the way - c:\RDCOM.err can get very very huge..