Profile view pane is an embedded web-browser that allows you to view both on-line company's profiles as well as pages stored locally on your hard disk.
You can define URL-template for viewing on-line (or off-line) company's profiles.
These URL-templates are market-based, which means you can have different templates
for each market. The template is then parsed to make actual URL to the web page.
For example to see Yahoo's profiles page you can use following URL template:
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/{t0}/{t}.html. Symbols enclosed in brackets {} define
fields which are evaluated in execution time. {t0} symbol is evaluated to the
first character of the ticker name and {t} is evaluated to the whole ticker
name. So if AAPL is selected AmiBroker will generate following URL from above
template: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/a/aapl.html
Then AmiBroker uses built-in web browser to display the contents of the page.
Note that it is also possible to browse local files using this mechanism. Simply
use following template URL (example, C: denotes drive): file://C:\the_folder_with_profile_files\{t}.html.
You are not limited to HTML files, you can use simple TXT files instead.
As shown in above example template URL can contain special fields which are substituted at run time by values corresponding to the currently selected symbol. The format of the special field is {x} where x is describes field type. Currently there are three allowable field types: ticker symbol in original case{t}, ticker symbol in lowercase {s}, ticker symbol in UPPERCASE {S}, alias {a}, web id {i}. You can specify those fields anywhere within the URL and AmiBroker will replace them with appropriate values entered in the Information window.
You can also reference to single characters of ticker, alias or web id. This is useful when given web site uses first characters of, for example, ticker to group the html files (Yahoo Finance site does that), so you have files for tickers beginning with 'a' stored in subdirectory 'a'. To reference to single character of the field use second format style {xn} where x is field type described above and n is zero-based index of the character. So {a0} will evaluate to the first character of the alias string. To get first two characters of a ticker write simply {t0}{t1}.
Note about web id field: this new field in Information window was added to handle situations when web sites do not use ticker names for storing profile files. I found some sites that use their own numbering system so they assign unique number to each symbol. AmiBroker allows you to use this nonstandard coding for viewing profiles. All you have to do is to enter correct IDs in Web ID field and use appropriate template URL with {i} keyword.