Investment Studio > Views > Downloads > Downloader > Introduction

The tasks of retrieving raw data from local or online sources, parsing the data and saving the results to disk are handled by the downloader:

The downloader runs as a separate process and can act both as an automation server, fulfilling requests from Investment Studio's Downloads view, and as a stand-alone application, carrying out instructions passed over the command line.

This allows you to keep working as usual in Investment Studio while the database is being updated in the background, without running the risk of losing your work in case of download problems. It also minimizes system load when you just want to update your data (perhaps as a scheduled activity) without having to load the entire application and the whole database in memory.

Two minor drawbacks with this approach are that you may have to wait a few seconds for the downloader to launch before some operations invoked from the Downloads view are carried out (if the downloader was not already running) and that you may occasionally have to manually switch between the main Investment Studio window and windows managed by the downloader (in particular, the single and multiple item editors).

The downloader window contains no interactive controls, other than the (close) button in its upper right corner. All it does is display a chronological event list (most recent event on top). Most of the time, it therefore makes sense to reduce its size to a single row and place it in some corner of the screen where it's not in the way.