MDK - Programming Question

U

UnderGround

Yah has anyone used the Metastock Development kit to program there own custom indicators? If so mabye you could answer the below questions for me, if you can help PLEASE DO:) Equis seems to dance around ever question you ask them, I wish they could just give me a straight answer sometimes......

1) This question is asked in light of overall performance optimizing...If one has a custom formula called A, which is actively in use on a chart, and another formula B on the same chart wants to use say "val3" of A, and does so by referencing, does Metastock actually use the existing array containing val3 of A, or does it completely re-do the calculation over again?

2) Is there a way to do a "if then" conditional code execution in a custom formula? by this I mean not just the boolean return that I can see from the docs, but actually choose whether or not to execute certain parts of formula code based on an IF statement return value. After significant review of docs, examples, and website resources, I cannot seem to find a way to do this.

3) I cannot find any provisions to write anything to an external file within a formula. For my purposes this is a debugging tool, but I'm sure this would be useful for all users. Is there any way to do this within formula language? I'm doing a kludge by DLL right now...

4) I am aware of the "Live Bars" realtime checkbox, and also the provision to re-calculate Experts only at bar end.... Is there a way to have a custom formula recalculated only at bar end, yet still have the chart bars update visually with every tic?

Any help would be greatly appreciated :confused:

Thanks allot :D
 
I don't know much about software yet but I can say don't waste your time with MetaStock if you plan to create indicators or systems.
 
Quote from UnderGround:

No one has a clue???:confused:
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Underground,

I posted already about this. I gave up Metastock a couple of years ago because of the hassle involved to get at MDK. I see that not much has been changed in the meantime and that my decision was probably the right one given the lack of response to your inquiry. In fact without decent easily accessible programming tools this thing is utterly worthless.

Sorry,

nononsense
 
Alright guys I get your point, what do you recommend to use if you are creating your own custom formulas and advisors??? I was thinking of writing my own platform using Pat Systems API kit is there something better out there to use???
 
Quote from UnderGround:

Alright guys I get your point, what do you recommend to use if you are creating your own custom formulas and advisors??? I was thinking of writing my own platform using Pat Systems API kit is there something better out there to use???
More...

Hi Underground,

I am very much interested in this myself. From what I learned however, there is no sense in attempting to do this if you cannot find an online testing facility for your platform, similar to IB's demo facility. If you see a way to do this, please tell us about it. I only encountered impressive upfront fees to get at "the kit" and costly Pat Systems "approval" examinations for your new soft.

Be good,

nononsense
 
Quote from UnderGround:

Alright guys I get your point, what do you recommend to use if you are creating your own custom formulas and advisors??? I was thinking of writing my own platform using Pat Systems API kit is there something better out there to use???
More...

Under scrutiny, all of these platforms / kits have revealed problems that we were unwilling to live with: they just didn't come close to meeting our requirements. The decision was to simply write our own platform. This option has saved us from numerous problems and freed us to interchange data providers and execution partners with a minimal impact on our business.

As long as you design the interfaces so that they are pluggable (XML) you will not be held hostage by any vendor - except perhaps Microsoft although a really good design allows you to unplug them as well - our does and it ports over to Linux with very little effort.
 
Quote from CalTrader:



Under scrutiny, all of these platforms / kits have revealed problems that we were unwilling to live with: they just didn't come close to meeting our requirements. The decision was to simply write our own platform. This option has saved us from numerous problems and freed us to interchange data providers and execution partners with a minimal impact on our business.

As long as you design the interfaces so that they are pluggable (XML) you will not be held hostage by any vendor - except perhaps Microsoft although a really good design allows you to unplug them as well - our does and it ports over to Linux with very little effort.
More...

CalTrader,

Your plea for self-sufficiency rings a bell here! As to your worries about independence from M$, I am in the same situation as you and many others. I just recently started to look at GUI toolkits running under both Win32 and Linux. Languages C, C++ and Python. You may be interested to take a look at:

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/928/
http://www.python.org/
http://www.wxwindows.org/
http://wxpython.org/

As a matter of fact, I started with wxPython and I am really amazed. This may very well be my way to solve the M$ riddle for developers striving for longterm independence. (XML no problem, need C or C++ also OK, db support excellent).
 
Thanks guys for the advise I think in the new yr I will start to whip up my own platform, thus I can add everything that I want plus if I want to make changes to it later I can.

CalTrader:
Thanks for the info about XML I will do that for sure.

Nononsense:
The API kit for Pats was not to bad it runs about a 1000 dollars US. About the same price for purchasing Metacrap I mean Metastock.
On line testing may not be as hard as you think. Just write it so that the data vendor you are using right now can plug into it. And then if you are testing order execution just right your program to send the execution off to a dummy location instead of the brokerage firm.
I will keep you posted and this so that if you guys choice to do it yourself you won't fall into all the same pitfalls.

Just a side note: You should program your stuff in C++ it far superior than java or python. It give your program greater range. So if you are going to only learn one code start there. The others all really easy after that on. Thats just my 2cents
 
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