Tutorial216

Markplex

Tutorial 216 demonstrates how to write an EasyLanguage program in TradeStation that displays the real time volume for the bar that’s being formed, the volume for the previous bar and the volume of the three previous bars before that. The information is positioned towards the top of the chart and colored rectangles are placed behind the text. https://markplex.com/free-tutorials/tutorial-216-volume-value-display/

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to tutorial 216. In this tutorial I had a question as to how to create

00:08a show me study that showed the volume of the current bar in the right hand box,

00:15the bar before that and the next box and so on for the next five bars and as you can see the

00:21the up-to-date the the most recent bar is updating as as the bar develops. So let's have a look at

00:28the program and first thing we need to do is when the program is first applied to the chart in a one

00:36statement we're going to be creating a charting host and we're going to be creating two events

00:43for the charting host. One is initial update on initial update and the other one is on size. So

00:49in other words if we go back to the chart and we decide for example drag the chart you'll see that

00:56the the size of the the boxes adjust. Now if you if you're unfamiliar with how to set up the charting

01:04host what you can do is go to toolbox double click on the charting host and in fact let's just do that

01:11and then having selected that if you go to this events icon here and then you can click double

01:18click on the events that you want an event to take place. So we've done on initial update and we've

01:25also done one on size so by clicking those you'll see the syntax but we don't need to do that right

01:32now it's just going to delete that and we've also created a couple of vectors one text effect and one

01:39box effect these these we're going to use to store the the text objects and the the rectangle objects

01:47as we create them then the next thing we do is create the initial text objects and rectangles

01:56now we don't have any specific place to put these we just put them in a random place but what we have

02:04done is set some of the attributes of the item so for example text object we needed to make it persist

02:13we've used we're setting the font and we're using actually a user input for the font name font size

02:19color again it's a user input and we've set the h style v style and then we've added that to the chart

02:26we're doing this for zero one two three and four four so five text objects and at the same time

02:35we're also drawing a rectangle now we're using the the method draw rectangle which i've created and

02:42again we're just putting these in a random place we're also setting the color so the color depends

02:47whether the counter value is zero one two three or four then we're adding that to the chart so this

02:54means that once those have been created even if we change the size of the chart we we will not need

03:00to recreate those so the next thing is well let's just have a quick look at the the rect or rectangle

03:08method which just makes things a little simpler and it's just using the the rectangle dot create

03:16and in this case you'll notice that we're using x y points and the advantage of the x y point

03:22is that even as we get more bars and so on the position of the x y point doesn't change so that

03:31will stay static in one place on the chart anyway this is the method to draw that and to add it to

03:40the chart and to return that value which we then store in the vector what we then got are the two

03:47the two events both similar or in fact exactly the same syntax and what we do is every time one of

03:55these events fired one of the events is fired we go through the counter 0 1 2 3 4 4 and what we do

04:04is we change the for example the position of the text we calculate where it's supposed to be at the

04:14current time and that depends on the width of the window we know that through args dot width

04:21and by calculating where we want it to be you can position it so that you've got those five

04:29different positions for the text and then so we're creating the x y point using this calculation

04:40based on args dot width which is the current width of the window then we're setting the point value of

04:46the text label to that value and then we're doing something similar with the rectangle but we're doing

04:51set start point and set end point and again we're calculating the x y point in this case we're doing it

04:58within the uh within the input to the set start point and those values ensure that we get the five

05:05different rectangles um equally spaced and uh they've already been given the color that we needed

05:13incidentally the colors are set to be user inputs so color one two three four and five um using the color

05:23objects you can see that they're in quotes the text color we can also set the color i've set that to

05:29ivory font name in this case um arial font size and then height percentage now what this does is works

05:39at how thick the lines are going to be so for example if you had a far smaller chart you might wish to

05:45reduce that value um play around with that to make sure that the the rectangles are the size that you

05:53want uh we've got namespaces as you can see which i've uh included some comments as to what they do

06:01and then the final thing we've got is that we're updating the volume values on each tick so the uh the

06:10volume value we get from the ticks keyword and bear in mind ticks the word uh the keyword ticks

06:16varies in its meaning uh depending on what sort of chart and what the the setting is in uh for the

06:23show me study so you might want to just read up on that if you right click on ticks um say definition

06:29and then go here click on easy language reserve words related ticks volume etc and then you can see

06:37what the various different meanings are so ticks is total volume for uh for charting stock stock symbols

06:44intraday however if you set the uh the tick count uh if the uh that's only if trade volume is selected

06:52if tick count is selected then it becomes the total number of ticks so the up-to-date value of um of

06:59volume is is calculated each time and then the the text string is set to that value or rather the uh the

07:08number is converted to a string and then the text string is set to that value and you can see uh if

07:14you look at the chart that being updated as the the bar develops anyway hopefully you might find this

07:23useful if uh if you want to type it in you're very welcome to do that otherwise i will make it

07:30available on markplex.com and as always also please consider joining gold pass thank you very much

07:41thank you very much

07:56you

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