Ripple Fees

There are two types of fee:

• Transaction fee is a network charge levied in XRP. This is taken from the account balance for each order or trade transaction as described here. This fee is put into the UserTrade fee fields.

• Transfer fee charged by the issuer levied in the currency of traded instrument. Whoever sends an asset pays the fee, the receiver does not incur a charge. Not all issuers will set a fee, so some transfers may to fee free. A description of their transfer fee can be found here. These fees are stored in RippleUserTrade object transfer fee fields.

Ripple REST API Server

Ripple Labs strongly advise not to use https://api.ripple.com/ for any requests that require sending a secret key. The Ripple REST API documentation has the warning below copied at a number of different places:

"DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SECRET TO AN UNTRUSTED REST API SERVER The secret key can be used to send transactions from your account, including spending all the balances it holds. For the public server, only use test accounts."

It also says:

"WARNING: If you submit your secret to a server you do not control, your account can be stolen, along with all the money in it. We recommend using a test account with very limited funds on the public Ripple-REST server."

In a Ripple forum discussion someone from Ripple Labs explains:

"While we at Ripple Labs aren't planning on stealing anyone's secret keys, we don't want people to "just trust us" instead of following proper security practices. We're also not protecting the server logs of our public API servers with the extreme precautions we use to protect things like Ripple Trade accounts. If we were to get hacked, or if one of our operations employees went rogue, any secret key you submitted to api.ripple.com could be used to take control of that account. Obviously we're not planning on either of those scenarios, but it's a risk you don't have to take."

The simplest solution is to run a plain text (no SSL encryption, http not https) local Ripple REST API Server that signs transactions before sending them securely to a remote rippled server. If SSL encryption is not being used then to ensure the security of your secret key the server should be running locally and listening only on the localhost interface. There are instructions on how to run a local REST API Server here which by default connects to rippled servers at wss://s1.ripple.com:443. This can be configured using the XChange initialisation:

	ExchangeSpecification specification = new ExchangeSpecification(RippleExchange.class.getName());
    specification.setSslUri(""); // remove the default api.ripple.com connection
    specification.setPlainTextUri(RippleExchange.REST_API_LOCALHOST_PLAIN_TEXT);
    specification.setSecretKey("s****************************");
    
    Exchange exchange = ExchangeFactory.INSTANCE.createExchange(specification);

However, if you are using a test account, or if for some other reason you decide that you really want to trust https://api.ripple.com/ then this must be explicitly enabled to prevent an exception being thrown on creation. This is done by setting the parameter item trust.api.ripple.com to true in the XChange specification, e.g.

    ExchangeSpecification specification = new ExchangeSpecification(RippleExchange.class.getName());
    specification.setSslUri(RippleExchange.REST_API_RIPPLE_LABS);
    specification.setSecretKey("s****************************");
    specification.setExchangeSpecificParametersItem(RippleExchange.TRUST_API_RIPPLE_COM, true);

    Exchange exchange = ExchangeFactory.INSTANCE.createExchange(specification);

Order Entry

If the account does not have sufficient balance to fully execute an order, a partial (unfunded) order will be entered into the market as described here. This detail is not included in the response message so is not possible to immediately identify at
the point of order entry. If identification of unfunded orders is important they can be found using an order book poll.

Trade History

The trade history query relies on querying notifications, and then for every order type querying the corresponding hash. This has the potential to generate a large number of API calls and be slow. A RippleTradeHistoryParams object can be used to target the query more efficiently in line with the applications requirements.