Please post any questions and problems or suggestions you have in this thread about my Sierra Chart ACSIL for Beginners to keep that thread reasonably concise and clean of tangents.

Sierra Chart ACSIL for Beginners. Hi I'm starting two threads on steps to get started using Sierra Charts Advanced Custom Study/System Interface and Language (ACSIL). This thread I would like to keep just for examples and steps to producing your own Custom Studies and Trading systems …

Thanks.

I'm really liking this so far. I needed to get off my lazy ass and set up VS instead of Notepad++ so I can do real debugging instead of debug-by-guess. The first few posts were a good nudge in that direction for me.

Your examples are nice and clear, and you've pulled together a number of simple basic things so far from the SC documentation that took me a while to go find and figure out when I started with SC. It's very step-by-step and one step builds on another, as it should.

I think what you're doing will be very helpful to anyone with a little programming experience who wants to get up to speed in SC coding.

I'll definitely be following along.

Bob.

@Trembling Hand* Thank you so much for doing this.
I seem to remember setting up VS in such a way that you don't need to restart sierrachart whilst doing a build. It is so that you can debug code while being in a live environment which is great for stepping through and verifying variables in real time. Debugging this way does lock Sierra for the duration of the debug process though.

In your next project would you mind working with time functions? For example going back to yesterday at 11:30 and getting the high and low of the prior 2 hours. Or plotting a line 30 points away from the open of the bar at 13:30 for every day.
Just examples but really anything to do with time locations.

Thanks again. I'm looking forward to the next lesson

Grantx 

@Trembling Hand* Thank you so much for doing this. I seem to remember setting up VS in such a way that you don't need to restart sierrachart whilst doing a build. It is so that you can debug code while being in a live environment which is great for stepping through and verifying variables in real-time. Debugging this way does lock Sierra for the duration of the debug process though.

In this order:
1. Analysis>>Build Custom Studies DLL>>Build >> Install Visual C++ Compiler
2. Install Visual Studio. (if you had it installed already before doing step 1, then you need to uninstall it and start over at step 1 or it will not work.)
3. Follow the steps here to Use VS as your IDE and debugger:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?page=doc/StepByStepACSILDebugging.php

When you are debugging and hit a break point, Sierra is locked until you Continue or Stop Debugging.

Trembling Hand 

Please post any questions and problems or suggestions you have in this thread about my Sierra Chart ACSIL for Beginners

Thanks a lot for creating this tutorial! Following!

Ditto from me... thanks for taking the time to create this tutorial.

Even though I installed everything in the correct order, still couldn't build w/o shutting down SC. Plus, when I did build, got numerous warnings, like 36 warnings (I'm talking about a completely coded study).

So.... just to check...

I copied my cpp file over to ACS_Source, used VS to open the cpp file in that folder, ran the build/debug from SC > Analysis. That seemed to work well and didn't get any warnings. I was up and running and debugging w/o issue... and I didn't have to shut down SC.

Guess I'll continue coding using that workflow.

Again, thanks for helping me get started!

In the Spreadsheet Trading System , there is inputs to enable trading within time range, i.e

J85 : Allow Trading Only During Time Range (read/write):
J86 :Start Time For Allowed Time Range (read/write):
J87: End Time For Allowed Time Range (read/write):

How can we add these variables to an ACSIL code ?

mosalem2003 

In the Spreadsheet Trading System , there is inputs to enable trading within time range, i.e J85 : Allow Trading Only During Time Range (read/write): J86 :Start Time For Allowed Time Range (read/write): J87: End Time For Allowed Time Range (read/write): How can we add these variables to an ACSIL code ?

You already have the BarTime variable. Add two sc.input Time values for your start and end time.

Then just do an if statement to check that the current bar time is within the two inputs before proceeding to the nested trade logic statements.

 

Code

SCInputRef Input_StartTime = sc.Input[3]; SCInputRef Input_EndTime = sc.Input[4];

 

Code

Input_StartTime.Name = "Start Time"; Input_StartTime.SetTime(0); Input_EndTime.Name = "End Time"; Input_EndTime.SetTime(SECONDS_PER_DAY - 1);

.....

 

Code

int CurrentBarTime = sc.BaseDateTimeIn[sc.Index].GetTime(); bool TradingAllowed = Input_StartTime.GetTime() <= CurrentBarTime <= Input_EndTime.GetTime(); if (!TradingAllowed) return;

I have used the above code , it compiled successfully but in execution the trading is working independent of start and end time ?

 

Code

if ( Input_StartTime.GetTime() < CurrentBarTime && Input_EndTime.GetTime() > CurrentBarTime)

I used this code instead and it works ...

But not sure why the expression below didn't work though -- should we separate each operand comparison than merging the comparison in one statement as in the above expression that worked ?

 

Code

if ( Input_StartTime.GetTime() <= CurrentBarTime <= Input_EndTime.GetTime() )