That's not entirely accurate and we'll update the manual to more accurately reflect what is going on and take a more in-depth look at what it really should be doing.
What actually occurs is currency rates will be retrieved from the cache, unless it's expired (as specified by that appconfig) at which time the rates will be retrieved from the Currency table in the database. The values in the database are set either manually when you update them in the admin section, or when you manually execute the feed.
It's a fairly simple modification to make it actually call the feed instead of selecting from the database, you simply have to add in the private XmlDocument RatesDoc property in the Currency.cs class (however this will require a recompile). But you could also check the cache in another page that you have access to (that isn't part of the source code) and if the cache has expired just make a call to
Code:
Currency.GetLiveRates();
to update the values in the database (return type is void...so you don't have to set it to a variable or do anything else in the code to make it stick)
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