Indicial.ro

Indicial.ro is a Romanian currency exchange rate site — daily reference rates, a currency converter, and historical rate charts, built on the official public XML feeds published by the National Bank of Romania (BNR).

It offers the same kind of functionality as sites like valutare.ro (daily rates, converter, exchange-office comparison, historical charts), with original branding and design. The official reference rate is fetched live from BNR; exchange-office and bank rates are real quotes entered manually from their own published boards/sites (no live feed exists for those), kept current by periodic updates.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS v4
• Recharts for the historical rate chart
• fast-xml-parser to parse BNR's XML feeds

Data sources

• Daily rates: https://www.bnr.ro/nbrfxrates.xml
• Historical rates: https://www.bnr.ro/files/xml/years/nbrfxrates{year}.xml

Both are public feeds documented at bnr.ro. If they're unreachable (e.g. no outbound network access), the app falls back to bundled sample data and labels it as such in the UI.

Automatic daily refresh

BNR republishes rates once a day, usually between 13:00 and 13:15 Europe/Bucharest time. Two mechanisms keep the site in sync with no manual steps:

1. Time-based fallback (works on any host). Fetches to the BNR feeds are cached for 5 minutes (rates) / 1 hour (history) via Next.js's fetch cache (src/lib/bnr.ts). The first request after that window expires automatically refetches BNR in the background. No cron needed — worst case the site is a few minutes stale.
2. Instant refresh via /api/revalidate (optional, for precise timing). This route calls revalidateTag/revalidatePath to invalidate the cache immediately. vercel.json schedules it twice a day, at 10:15 and 11:15 UTC — one of those always lands at ~13:15 Bucharest time regardless of DST (EEST in summer, EET in winter), so it self-adjusts across the March/October clock changes without editing the schedule.

To enable step 2 on Vercel: set a CRON_SECRET environment variable in the project settings (any random string). Vercel automatically sends it as Authorization: Bearer <CRON_SECRET> when it triggers the cron, and the route checks it before revalidating. On another host, hit the same URL from your own scheduler instead, e.g.:

curl "https://your-domain.com/api/revalidate?secret=$CRON_SECRET"

Without CRON_SECRET set, /api/revalidate responds 500 and the site still updates fine via mechanism 1, just within a 5-minute window instead of instantly.

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Project structure

• src/lib/bnr.ts — fetch/parse BNR feeds, with fallback data
• src/lib/demoOffices.ts — sample exchange-office comparison data
• src/app/api/rates, src/app/api/history — JSON endpoints used by client components
• src/app/* — home, /convertor, /istoric, /despre