In the documentation here, Bloomberg does not make a distinction in the request. The requests can only have 3 things:securities, fields and overrides.
So what are options? How do they get used? Is this a distinction imposed by Rblpapi? Can someone explain the distinction?
Please let me know if I am incorrectly understanding something.
Options are parameters that change how a Request or Subscription should behave. For example, a ref data request with returnEID=true will return the EID(s) of each security in response messages. A Subscription with interval=5.0 will make it an Intervalized Subscription.
Overrides, on the other hand, are field/value pairs that you specify in Requests to alter the form or content of the returned fields, for example, GICS_SECTOR_NAME will normally return sector name in English (or precisely the default terminal language), you can specify SECURITY_NAME_LANG=9 override to get the name in Korean. You can also "request" SECURITY_NAME_LANG field to know the language used in GICS_SECTOR_NAME field. Overrides can be used in Request/Response only (not subscriptions), and are applied to the entire request, on all fields that react to that override.
option.names = "optName", option.values = "optVal"
in R, maps to:
request.set("optName", optVal);
in Java. E.g:
option.names="periodicitySelection", option.values="MONTHLY")
request.set("periodicitySelection", "MONTHLY");
