NoSides (FIX tag 552)

NumInGroupFIX 4.4group counter

NoSides (tag 552) is a NumInGroup field defined in FIX 4.4. It appears in 4 message types and is required in 4 of them. Its datatype is NumInGroup, which makes it a repeating-group counter: its value is the number of entries that follow, not a quantity in its own right. It is an enumerated field with 2 defined values.

At a glance

Tag: 552
Name: NoSides
Datatype: NumInGroup (int)
Dialects: FIX 4.4
Messages: 4
Valid values: 2

What the specification says

Number of Side repeating group instances.

Descriptions are quoted from the FIX Orchestra sources under the Apache 2.0 licence.

A real message using tag 552

TradeCaptureReport · FIX 4.4

Tag	Field	Wire value	Meaning
8	BeginString	FIX.4.4
9	BodyLength	183
35	MsgType	AE	Trade Capture Report
49	SenderCompID	BOARTEAM
56	TargetCompID	COUNTERPARTY
34	MsgSeqNum	2
52	SendingTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
571	TradeReportID	EXAMPLE
570	PreviouslyReported	N	not reported to counterparty
32	LastQty	1000000
31	LastPx	1.09210
75	TradeDate	20240101
60	TransactTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
552	NoSides2 entries	2	repeating group
54	Side	1	Buy
37	OrderID	ORD-10042
54	Side	1	Buy
37	OrderID	ORD-10042
10	CheckSum	057

Edit and decode it yourself

Shown with | separators for readability. On the wire FIX uses SOH (0x01), an invisible control byte — and because BodyLength and CheckSum are computed over the actual bytes, the two forms have different checksums. Both are valid and both decode here.

Open in the full decoder →

Generated from the FIX 4.4 dictionary and verified at build time: it parses and validates with no issues. Open the decoder to try your own message.

Valid values

A value outside this list is not a parse error — the message still decodes — but validate() reports it as validate/value-not-in-enum.

Value	Meaning	Symbolic name
1	one side	ONE_SIDE
2	both sides	BOTH_SIDES

Where tag 552 appears

Requiredness is a property of the message, not of the field: the same tag can be optional in one message and conditionally required in another.

Message	MsgType	Requiredness	Where in the message
CrossOrderCancelReplaceRequest	t	Required	inside the SideCrossOrdModGrp component
CrossOrderCancelRequest	u	Required	inside the SideCrossOrdCxlGrp component
NewOrderCross	s	Required	inside the SideCrossOrdModGrp component
TradeCaptureReport	AE	Required	inside the TrdCapRptSideGrp component

Wire format

The number of entries in the repeating group that follows. The next field on the wire is the group's delimiter tag. @boarteam/fix parses the value as a number and reports parse/invalid-int when it does not lex as one; the raw string is kept either way.

Read tag 552 in TypeScript

decode.tsts

import { createFixEngine } from "@boarteam/fix";import { dictionary } from "@boarteam/fix-dict-fix44";const fix = createFixEngine(dictionary);const { message, issues } = fix.parse(raw);// NoSides is a group counter, so the entries live on message.groups —// NOT on message.fields. message.fields[552] is undefined.const entries = message.groups[552] ?? [];for (const entry of entries) {  // entry.fields is keyed by tag; entry.groups holds nested groups}

Decode this in your own code

The same engine that produced the decoded example above is an Apache-2.0 npm package with zero runtime dependencies. It runs in Node and in the browser, and parse() returns problems as data instead of throwing.

npm i @boarteam/fix @boarteam/fix-dict-fix44

Try the decoder Source on GitHub