Improved multi-timeframe/offset/chart period converter, P4L PeriodCon.mq4

This indicator is really entirely time-based so it may be easier to just do something else from scratch. That said, I don't have any plans to do so at present. I have seen a few MT4 "tick chart" programs that are out there, but none that I use (at least none successfully). The ones I've seen plot every tick and just shift the entire chart as ticks come in, which can be rather tedious and a big load for your CPU. I have not seen (but haven't much looked for) any existing MT4 program that counts ticks and combines them into bars. Of course this feature is part of some other charting software and I wish MT4 had it too. If anyone knows of a suitable MT4 program that can do it, please post more info here.

hi
Any idea why only the most recent period updates and not all of them?

Issue resolved.Period converter is now updating all the 3 charts i've created.
To generate multiple converted charts -
you need to attach multiple indicators (period converter) to the source chart.

To create 5 time frames add the converter 5 times to the source chart and not just once! Each indicator will have a different multiplier to correspond to the time frame. No wonder only 1 chart was updating since only 1 source multiplier was running and each time it was changed only the last chart updated.

thanks pips4life and majestic12.

i am trying to use this indi to generate yearly candles.

i'm not having much joy. am using monthly chart, period multiplier 12. now to have the candle open in january, i am using (time shift bars) and set it to -10. i've tried with a number of settings, candles to change a little, but just cant seem to hit january open.

i'm obviously doing something wrong. any help appreciated.

I really haven't used yearly charts much so I didn't notice that there is indeed a problem with them in that they don't combine the obvious Jan-Dec monthly candles as you would expect. It seems like this used to work in a previous version and some later changes I made broke it... or it truly never worked properly. I'm surprised you're the first to comment on it.

I'm not sure when I can look at it to see if there's an easy fix or not. Sorry but I have some other projects on my plate for now.

pips4life, all your collection of MQ4 tools is simply great. Great support and documentation too - well done !

I am hopeful that someone like yourself will write a good quality Constant Range Bars indicator for MT4.

We have a hack of a Period_Converter indicator that we are currently using. It is called Range_Bar.mq4 found in this post. It is OK but paints erratic bars during fast market moves. Also being a hackup we're not sure how accurate it is. I have had a look through it but cannot follow the code very well.

We are having considerable success with RangeBars for reasons discussed in this article.

May I suggest that it is worth your while to become more familiar with Constant Range Bars. The current work we are doing is in this thread.

Regards, RD

Has anybody noticed the indicator is wrong?
for example ,for the timeframe 4DAILY the indicator calculates all the days ,weekend included.
mon+tue+wed+thur, fri+sat+sun+mon ... etc.
I wonder if its possible to calculate only TRADING days?

It's not "wrong", rather it's just not designed to slice up the time periods using a "trading" week. It uses a calendar method.

That said, how useful is a "D4" chart regardless of how you slice it? I can see it would probably be better if it were 4 consecutive tradings days, then the next 4 trading days, etc. because each bar would represent 4 days of trading "energy". But obviously some bars would start on Monday, the next a Friday, the next a Thursday, the next a Wednesday, the next a Tuesday, then the pattern resumes the next Monday. What is to specify on which Monday the very first bar starts?? Different feeds would start each bar differently.

While such a feature might be useful, it is not a personal priority for me to implement such changes at this time, so if someone else wants to take it on, please be my guest.

See post #1 for the latest version v1.9 update.

2011-03-23: Released v1.9 update of "P4L PeriodCon.mq4"
Changes:
* Fixed some of the problems with higher timeframe charts (e.g. weekly) that caused the start-of-the-bar to be irregular (i.e. a weekly should start the beginning of the week, either Sunday or Monday, not a Thursday for example). Some higher timeframe charts that involve timeshifts may or may not work, because the method to "slice" up the source bars and allocate them is not perfect. This version, however, is better than v1.8

See post #1 for the first release of version v1_0.

2011-04-01: First Release v1_0 of "P4L getPeriodSymbolTimeshiftsecLib.mq4"
New:
* This libary file can be included in your MQ4 indicator/script/EA source files to interpret the "Symbol()" and "Period()" values as modified by the "P4L PeriodCon.mq4" indicator. The library routine returns the period, symbol, and timeshiftsec values. It is up to the user to properly incorporate the values into your code.
* Two use models are described in the code, either to call the routine in a separate library file, or to include the 3 necessary routines in your source code.
* Note: This is brand new code and was tested for some commonly generated charts. It hasn't been fully tested for every obscure possible chart multiplier/timeshift combination. Report any problems found by posting to the thread.

I downloaded the latest versions from page 1 but can't get them to work (operator error I am sure).
I am trying to show GMT +1 hour on 5min and 15 min EUR/USD charts. I read through page one instructions and the whole thread but no matter what, the time remains the same on the chart (GMT)
Can someone please tell me a step by step simple guide to get it to wotk for me.
Thanks

Lavenham,

It's working fine for me, so it must be a misunderstanding how to use it. Perhaps you're expecting the *source* chart (to which you add the two PeriodCon's) to change, and that's not how it works. Rather, the source M5 chart (or you could use M1) is simply generating the data, not displaying it.

Open a source M5 chart. Add two PeriodCon's to it. For both be sure "Allow DLL imports" is enabled in the "Common" tab. (If you don't, you'll get an Error message). In the "Inputs" tab section, change the PeriodMultiplier to "1" and "3" respectively. Change "TimeShiftAdd_in_HptMM" to "1.0" for both.

Separately, you must use the MT4 menu command: File -> Open Offline -> navigate to the "EURUSD+1H,M5" and "EURUSD+1H,M15" charts that the source chart generates. Open those and they will display the data timeshifted by 1 hour.

See my picture below. Several relevant details are circled.

If you follow these directions it should work. Review the details in Post #1 again. If all that fails, give full details of what specifically isn't working (Broker; what's your source chart: what's your PeriodCon settings changed from defaults; what messages popup; can you find and open the offline charts; do they update real-time with new ticks? Open a Navigator window. Go to Experts and Journal tabs. Are there any error messages there?)

All working now - it was operator error my end! Only thing not working in the time-shifted screens are #SpudFibo and AutoPivotIndicator_ver5. Not a big problem - the lines are not drawing in the shifted charts. MultiplePivotsV2 is working fine.

Many thanks for your help - much appreciated.

You can *probably* get #SpudFibo and AutoPivotIndicator_ver5 to work as well by generating some additional offline timeframes with the same +1H timeshift. (I didn't try this but a quick glance at the code gives me some confidence it will work).

This applies to any indicator/program that you want to use that doesn't seem to work on the offline chart(s), especially the timeshifted ones. From MT4, in the Navigator window -> Custom Indicators (or wherever is the program), right-click over the indicator and choose "Modify". IF YOU HAVE THE SOURCE .MQ4 FILE, then it will open up the MetaEditor where you can look at the code. (If you don't have the source code, search with Google. I found these two easily).

You really don't have to be a programmer to do this. You're just looking and searching for clues what is the problem and how to proceed.

Open up the "#SpudFibo.mq4" file. Used Edit->Find to search for "Period" and "Symbol" (case IN-sensitive search without the "Word" mode is best).

Nothing is found for "Symbol" (good). But "Period" finds references to "PERIOD_D1".


(Tip: In MetaEditor, select "iBarShift" or "iHigh" and hit the F1 key to get Help info of the command syntax! It describes what each argument is.)

The "NULL" for these functions is the Symbol(), and it's just looking for the same Symbol() as on your chart. What is that? The PeriodCon has modified the Symbol() name so now it's "EURUSD+1H".

Well, you don't have a PERIOD_D1 (Daily) chart for "EURUSD+1H" unless you generate it, so do so! If your source chart is M5, add another PeriodCon with the PeriodMultiplier = 288 ( from 24 * 60 / 5 ). (NOTE: You do NOT have to actually open the offline chart. If PeriodCon is on a source chart, the data is getting generated whether you open the chart or not).

Alternatively, you could open a regular EURUSD,H1 chart, and add to it PeriodCon with PeriodMultiplier=24 and TimeShiftAdd_in_HptMM = 1.0 (to match your other +1H timeshifted charts)



What about AutoPivotIndicator_ver5 ? Do the same steps to open the source .mq4 file and search for "Period" and "Symbol".

It that source, it's a little trickier to spot the problem because instead of "PERIOD_D1", someone has just used the hard-coded "1440" (minutes/day). Elsewhere "10080" (minutes/week) and "43200" (minutes/month). (Example: ArrayCopyRates(Month_Price, Symbol(), 43200); )

The issue is the same. You need to generate "EURUSD+1H" of the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly charts.

For this, open a EURUSD,H1 chart. Add 3 instances of PeriodCon to it with PeriodMultipliers of 24, 168 (24*7), and 720 (24 * 30), respectively, all with
TimeShiftAdd_in_HptMM = 1.0. (FYI, for such long timeframes as Weekly and Monthly, I do not recommend using a source M5 chart, especially since the M5 chart is unlikely to contain very much data, possible < 1 month even. Just depends).

FYI, the EURUSD+1H,Monthly chart *should* work OK, but honestly the Monthly charts are tough because of the irregular length of the various months. They are not all simply 30 days long obviously. You should carefully inspect the offline Monthly chart and check the Open/Close values, and verify that these do indeed match the exact specific hours from your H1 chart for various months of different length.

Alternatively... suppose you don't care about the +1H timeshift but just want to see the Daily/Weekly/Monthly pivots from UN-shifted data but displayed on your M5 and M15 timeshifted charts. This is a case where you could modify the source MQ4 file to use the newly uploaded library file in post #1: P4L getPeriodSymbolTimeshiftsecLib.mq4

Basically you would need to replace "Symbol()" everywhere with a variable "symbol" whose value comes from the library routine. The "symbol" value would be just "EURUSD" and not what "Symbol()" thinks which is "EURUSD+1H". Obviously if the program looks for Daily/Weekly/Monthly data for the "EURUSD" symbol, those are standard charts so the data is there.

Modifying a program is a good experience to learn something about the MQ4 language. Yes, it can be tricky to do, but the rewards are often worth it. If nothing else, you can learn how to customize colors, default values, etc. in the programs you use the most.

Bottom line: Hopefully you can get your two indicators to work just by generating the additional Daily/Weekly/Monthly offline charts each with the +1H timeshift. If not, then unfortunately there may be some other subtle nuance in the indicator source code that needs tweaking to get each working.

Good luck!
Kent (pips4life)

Thanks for your help again. Spud works fine but AutoPivots still needs work so will just use it on the broker time.

I really appreciate the time and effort you have made to help and hopefully others reading this post will benefit too.

hello,

Been using your indicator for months now, its fantastic

1) I have a request Would it be posible to include an MA cross alert into the indicator for the offline charts produced? I've tried looking for an MA cross over Alert indicator which can be used on offline charts, but sadly have failed.

2) Also, any chance of including a partial lot close feature in the indicator as well. I know, this is not directly pertaining to the time modifier, but i thought i'd give it a go.

thx

kkBd

I’m not sure what I’m ding wrong.
I can display charts form the offline folder but they don’t update live?
What did I do wrong?
They are mainly shifted charts.

Thanx a lot.

Luca

Well

This is an absolutely awesome indicator and I have been using this for more than 4 months now.

I have a query though. I don't have access to charts on my office network. (I get a "No Connection" status in MT4 when I am on office network. Hence, I normally connect and disconnect from the internet (I use a data card) quite often to have a look at the charts.

And many a times, after I reconnect to the internet, the timeframes calculated using this indicator such as H2, M135, H3, etc. don't get updated when I reopen MT4 / reconnect to the internet. I have to repeat the whole process of Adding the custom indicator (P4L PeriodCon) and going to Open Offline.

This becomes quite time consuming since I use this indicator to calculate multiple time frames on multiple currency pairs.

Is there any way how I can get the updated charts after I reconnect to the internet without repeating the process over and over again?

Thanks
0908

Regarding #1: The "P4L PeriodCon" program has only to do with generating offline charts with either non-standard timeframes and/or timeshifted charts. I'm certain there are MA cross alert programs out there which either already work on offline charts or could be made to work with minor modifications. (I don't use MA cross alerts so I can't help with that). See my earlier post just 2 above yours for some tips on examining the code to look for places where your indicator might use "Symbol()" or "Period()", or "PERIOD_*". Those are potentially the lines which might need modification to work with offline charts.

Re #2: You may not know that MT4 has the capability to close partial lots on open trades. What is the minimum lot size for a trade with your broker? And is your open trade at least 2X that size or larger? If so, you can partially close your trade by specifying the lot size when you close the trade to something less than the original full size of the trade. For example, suppose you open some trade with 3 lots. Open the form to manage that trade. One choice is to close the entire trade at market. Notice the Lot size says "3" but there is nothing to stop you from changing that size down to "1", then push "Close" at market. One lot will close, but the other 2 will still be an open trade. You can repeat the partial close of another lot too, if desired.

Kent

Your description is quite strange to me, because I have no problems with my charts not updating after the internet reconnects after some time. I have my source chart open (e.g an M1) and it has "P4L PeriodCon" attached to generate the offline chart data (e.g. an M2). Separately I have the offline (M2) chart open. The offline chart(s) are updating live when connected. If I disconnect my internet cable for a few minutes, then reconnect it, the source chart catches up, and then all the missing offline chart bars get generated too.

Worse case I would think that just restarting MT4 should work fine. I can't think of any reason why you would need to re-add the indicator to your source chart to force the offline charts to get back in sync. Can you save a template of your source chart, and delete the original source chart, open a new blank one, then apply the template? Does that work? At least it would be easier than manually doing the same steps.

I cannot reproduce your problem so I'm sorry but I can't be of much help.

Kent