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Program 82 | Automatically syncing/replicating drawing objects on other charts

program82-workspace

Program 82 is designed to enable a user to manually create drawing objects (rectangles, trendlines, horizontal lines, vertical lines, text, and ellipses) on a chart and for these drawing objects to be created automatically on other charts, this includes charts in other workspaces of the same desktop.

If an object is subsequently moved on the sending chart, it is automatically moved on the receiving chart. If an object’s attributes (specifically: position, size, color, style, pattern, and fill) are changed on the sending chart these same attributes are changed on the receiving chart(s).

The program:  _Program82-SyncDrawingObjectExperiments is applied on the ‘sending’ chart. The program _Program82-SyncDrawingObjectExperiments-READ is applied on the receiving chart. The ShareRef user input to the programs must be the same on the sending and receiving charts.

Drawing objects been applied to a chart (sped up) and program 82 synchronizing another chart
The horizontal position of the drawing object is defined by the date time of a bar. If the same date time is not available on the receiving chart the closest equivalent bar is used.

These programs are designed to share the position of drawing objects drawn using the drawing object tool (i.e. drawn manually by the user.) They do not detect drawing objects drawn by programs.

The programs use the charting host to detect when the chart is clicked and objects selected. The drawing object attributes are shared between charts using a Global Dictionary.

You may be also interested in Tutorial 151 which uses the Global Dictionary to share horizontal lines between charts.

Important notes

Drawing objects can be added to the chart using the Drawing Objects tool. Drawing objects can be moved by clicking and dragging. To format a drawing object (e.g. to change its color, thickness, style etc) either double left click or right click the drawing object and then select the Format option from the menu. The other options on the menu (color, style, weight, transparency) will change the attributes of the drawing object but require it to be clicked again for the changes to be reflected on other charts. Drawing object must be deleted by right clicking the object and then selecting the remove option from the menu.

In order to keep this program and the receiving program relatively simple, drawing objects are deleted from the receiving chart and redrawn. This means that the programs cannot be used with other programs that draw objects or by manually drawing objects on the receiving chart(s).

More drawing object and the more charts require more processing resources.

The programs were developed in TradeStation 9.5 and will work in version 10 and new versions. They will not work with MultiCharts.

Technical notes

Ideally this program would be able to store the drawing objects directly into the global dictionary without reading and storing all the attributes as text and strings. This is not possible because in order to be able to share information in situations where multi-core mode is enabled the global dictionary is set up in multi-core mode, i.e. with the following syntax: GlobalDictionary.create(true, “share_name”); In this mode the only objects that can be shared are: numbers, strings, booleans, vectors or dictionaries (provided that the vectors and dictionaries only contain numbers, strings, booleans, vectors or dictionaries).

This program stores attributes of the drawing objects (position, color, style, thickness etc) into a vector. This vector is then stored in a Global Dictionary. A charting host object is also used. The charting host ‘click’ and ‘selected’ events are used to detect when the chart is clicked and the drawing object data needs to be updated.

The receiving program (_Program82-SyncDrawingObjectExperiments-READ) uses the global dictionary item changed event to detect when a drawing object has changed or been added on the sending chart. Such an event causes the program to delete and then redraw all the drawing objects. It achieves this by reading the vectors containing the drawing object attributes from the  global dictionary.

The two programs described in this tutorial (_Program82-SyncDrawingObjectExperiments and _Program82-SyncDrawingObjectExperiments-READ) are available for immediate download for $54.95. The download is a TradeStation ELD file that includes the unprotected and commented program. This program will not work in MultiCharts because it uses the TradeStation collections and other functionality that is not available in the MultiCharts environment.

Video explanation

Please contact markplex.com if you find any bugs or have questions.

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