How to delay time in between placing orders with EA?

Hello Folks,

I'm experimenting a little bit with coding in MQL4.

I would like to approach the following: No order send for one hour after another order had been send.

I do know about "sleep", which would be fine to a point, but not if I do have two currencie pairs, same EA enabled for each pair. So no matter on which currency pair a trade had been executed, I want to wait an hour.

AFAIK this can only be approached with some kind of an external file.
Anybody any input for me?

Thanks in advance.
MikeFT

I'm not sure why you can't use Sleep(). But perhaps the problem is that you doing something in an EA that is more suited to a script. If indeed you need an EA, just do some simple date arithmetic, like:

if (CurrentTime() > OrderOpenTime() + PERIOD_1H*60) SendOrder();

You should not use Sleep() for things like this, things like Sleep() are typically used when you have one execution thread that will never end, spending most of its time waiting in Sleep().

In MT4 an indicator or EA should be event driven (an incoming tick is the event) and your start() function will be called once for every incoming tick and should only do the things that have to be done in this particular tick and then immediately return without wasting time. If nothing has to be done at the moment it should immediately return.

This should lead you to the following (or similar) programming pattern (to make it more clear I will now put you into the perspective of the start() function):

 

1. you [the start() function] have been woken up because a new tick has arrived
2. you look at the clock to see what time it is, you are programmed to act only on a new bar opening
   1. if the clock indicates that there is not yet a new bar then this tick does not interest you anymore, you immediately stop working to not waste anyones time any longer. End of your day, good night, return(0);
   2. otherwise: the time might be right, this is a new bar, lets check how long it has been since the last order:
      1. less than 60 minutes: no thanks, I am not allowed to do anything so early after the last order, good night, return(0);
      2. more than one hour has passed since the last order, lets do the complicated calculation to calculate the signal [calculates...] ok, lets see:
         1. no signal. nothing to to. Wake me up on the next tick, good night, return(0);
         2. we have a signal: open a trade, ok, done. good night, return(0);

unfortunately you [the start() function] have Alzheimer's so you cannot remember anything from yesterday after you have been woken up, so you have been instructed to write down certain things that you will need "tomorrow" on little pieces of paper [static or global variables] to be able to make decisions when you are woken up the next time:

 

1. You have to write down the time when you have last seen a new bar, so you can know that you have seen this bar already.
2. you have to write down the time when you opened a trade so you can always know whether an hour has already passed. (your programmer could alternatively also have defined a procedure [function] for you how to extract this information from the order history every time, so you would not need to write it down, this depends on what the programmer thinks would be more effective)
3. sometimes the whole house can burn down [mt4 crash] while you are not awake and all the papers are gone, except you (you are a fireproof android with Alzheimer's and a fixed program) and the papers that you were programmed to put into the fireproof vault every "evening" [GlobalVariableSet() and GlobalVariableGet()] because your creator [programmer] who knew that this time would eventually come in his eternal wisdom has decided that they are too important to lose.

This is essentially how MT4 programming works.

.

lol... Good one
(hoping he doesn't take it personally)

Wow! Great post, 7bit.
I guess this is where I will look a little closer.

Thank you.
MikeFT

Hello! I need help. I want to make 2 buy orders with 200 pips sperating. But i don't want to use pending order. Pls i need code for this! Thx