FIX Plugin
The FIX plugin provides full session management for connecting to trading venues and counterparties using the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol. It ships as both an orchestrator plugin and an integration-adapter plugin, both pre-installed.
FIX is the only officially supported protocol that requires plugins on both the control plane and the data plane. The orchestrator plugin exposes FIX session state (logon status and sequence numbers) and the FIX message log, with export and search, in the Portal. The integration-adapter plugin manages live FIX sessions (initiator and acceptor), handles heartbeats, sequence numbers, gap fills, and reconnects, and applies a layered backpressure model under sustained load. The split exists because FIX sessions carry control-plane state that the Orchestrator manages independently of the data-plane runtime.
Provided components
When building pipelines in the Portal, these components appear in the dropdown menus. Their configuration fields are rendered dynamically based on the plugin version installed on your Orchestrator.
| Component ID | Name | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
fix-connector | FIX Connector | Connector | Manages a single FIX session as either an initiator (outbound dial) or an acceptor (inbound listen), including handshake, heartbeats, sequence tracking, gap fills, and reconnects. |
fix-message-condition | FIX Message Condition | Condition | Evaluates FIX message attributes (such as message type) to gate whether a route runs for a given message. |
fix-metadata-transformer | FIX Header Tunnel | Transformer | Tunnels non-FIX headers across a FIX session so latency markers and routing metadata survive a FIX hop. Pairs with the Traffic Source Connector, which stamps the perf_sent_ts header, for end-to-end latency measurement. |
fix-to-json-transformer | FIX to JSON | Transformer | Converts a structured FIX message into a JSON representation for downstream systems that consume JSON. |
fix-to-string-transformer | FIX to String | Transformer | Serializes a structured FIX message into its raw wire string for forwarding or inspection. |
json-to-fix-transformer | JSON to FIX | Transformer | Parses a JSON payload into a structured FIX message ready for delivery to a FIX target. |
string-to-fix-transformer | String to FIX | Transformer | Parses a raw FIX wire string into a structured FIX message that downstream pipeline stages can inspect and route. |
Supported FIX versions
| Version | Status |
|---|---|
| FIX 4.2 | Supported |
| FIX 4.4 | Supported |
| FIX 5.0 SP2 | Supported |
| Other versions | Supported via a custom data dictionary |
In this section
- What Is FIX?: a plain-language introduction to the protocol for readers new to it.
- FIX Configuration: connector fields, advanced settings, and configuration troubleshooting.
- FIX Operations: runtime behavior, durability, monitoring signals, sequence-number recovery, and operational troubleshooting.
For end-to-end integration patterns (venue connectivity, protocol bridging, fan-out, multi-venue aggregation), see the global Use Cases section.