Plot News indicator (version 3.0)

fanboy alert, so read at your own risk...

xp is what it is. it is fairly stable and user friendly but is now dated (and also isn't it unsupported now?). i used vista for only a short while at one point, and i didn't like it. it was unfriendly and difficult to use at first.

but, 7 is so NICE (and easy, and friendly)! yes it is based on vista, but from the ugly duckling that was vista has evolved the beautiful duck called windows 7. it's very friendly and easy to use, and UAC doesn't hound you constantly like in vista. in fact, i only see the UAC popup when i run legacy programs such as MT4 as UAC confirms with me that, yes, i do want to allow this old program to do what it wants. i don't run other older programs much so i just generally don't see UAC except when running mt4.

users will run into issues with vista / 7 because they don't realize that it keeps a sandbox directory for files created by older legacy programs such as mt4. although the files and directories are presented seamlessly to the programs as though they are simply located in the program files directory where the program expects the files to be, they are not actually located there. they are in the sandbox. so when a program like metaeditor presents it's own explorer dialog box for you to load an mql file to edit and so on it looks like the files are located in the program files directory, but they are not and are actually located away in the sandbox.

pro tip for 7 users (possibly vista as well) : you can tell the difference between a file that is and is not located in the sandbox simply by observing if the file icon has a little lock image overlaid on the icon or not. if there is a little lock symbol then the file is actually in the sandbox and not in program files. win7 at least gives you this visual sign so you can immediately tell if you are looking at a file that truly exists in whatever directory you are searching in or if it is actually located away in the sandbox and windows is just seamlessly presenting the file to you as though it was in this current directory. note though that windows explorer doesn't do this and it just shows you only what files are in the directory you are in which is why you can't find these sandboxed files when you go searching for them in the normal windows directory locations using windows explorer. it's only when looking at files and directories through the dialog boxes that appear when you do things like select file->new or file->save or file->open and so on since it is windows seamlessly presenting all relevant files and folders to the program you are in and the programs dialog box is then presenting to you the end user this already gathered set of files and folders as though the files and folders all one big happy bunch all located together, but again, at least you are visually shown a lock icon or not if something is actually in the sandbox.

if users don't run into some admin / UAC issue with mt4 trying to run a separate exe, or don't get confused when they go looking for a particular file and don't realize it's actually located in the sandbox... then that person is fortunate and must only be using basic indi's etc.

one issue that users will face with your news indi and associated exe and database is the following. a user will dump the contents of the zip file into the program file directory as instructed. that's fine. if they manage to update their database correctly without running into admin issues etc then awesome. BUT, if they then go rooting around in the program files directory and look at the CSV files created then they will surely get confused.... those files never got updated. win 7 created a new copy in the sandbox when the database and csv files were updated. so now there are actually 2 copies of these files, the old original version that was dumped into program files because it was a part of the zip file that was extracted there and which the user is now looking at with a confused daze on their face, and the newer files created when updating the database that exists in the sandbox because windows doesn't let legacy programs write files into the program files directory. unlike creating an indi or log file or whatever that you then search for with windows explorer and then won't find in the program files directory, this time you actually find the files you are looking for but they aren't the newer version of those files and these files won't actually ever be updated. they will just sit there forever as though they are in cryostasis, never getting updated.

it can be confusing if you don't know about the sandbox and what is happening.

the solution for most mt4 issues on vista / 7 is like i keep saying. cut and paste mt4 to a different location away from folders that windows uses. stick it on a usb drive. stick it on the desktop. whatever. most admin and 'vanishing file' issues people face will immediately stop, and all that is left after this are ACTUAL bugs and issues like bad mql etc. if you don't have mt4 in the program files directory then windows no longer cares about mt4 creating sub-directories and writing files because, although it is a legacy program, it isn't trying to write to the main windows program files directory anymore. so mt4 can now create any sub-directory or file it wants and none of it gets sandboxed. it doesn't potentially pose a threat to the integrity of windows and it's file structure so windows no longer cares about what it does.

anyway. point is that you should do as you say and simply not help anyone using vista / 7. it's simply too much hassle to explain what's happening to them. the solution is probably simply the above, but why bother even trying. if they just did a quick google they'd probably figure it out themselves and fix it.

some day you will no doubt have to upgrade to win7, and you will surely like it. win8, on the other hand, is concerning. but doesn't microsoft roll a dud every second release anyway?

WIN7 4 EVA!

It is because post #1 was last updated on 20/05/2011, and you need to download the news events from the FF calendar yourself (the instruction document explains how).

This thread is about providing a news indicator, not an up-to-date calendar. Anyway, despite this, I've attached a ZIP file of news events to post #196. If you download and install that as explained in that post, your news will be up to date, as of last week. Then you'll only need to run the download process going forward.

thanks hanover!

it works, I have now the csv file updated.

Nub, many thanks for your detailed explanation. I'm not sure that I agree that just because software is dated and unsupported, that it automatically makes it inferior. But perhaps that's not what you were saying.

Must admit that I had to read your post a second time to fully understand the 'sandbox' concept. Win7's UACs are apparently even more complex than I thought. Hence I continue to ask the same questions in my previous post:

1. Why should less computer literate folk like John Doe be subjected to these added complications?

2. Why should third party developers have to modify their apps to write their INI and data files elsewhere?

3. Why should I (and other third party developers) have to troubleshoot users' problems only to find that they are not in fact the result of bugs in my own code?

You may be right - I might grow to like Win7 one day. But then, like you, I'm a programmer, and hence user-friendliness is less of an issue. Unlike John Doe, I can probably do as you suggest - do a Google and fix it. I guess that's always been a problem with computers - you have to be a mechanic, just to drive your own car. And from what I've read and heard - Win7's UACs make that even more so.

David

i'm not arguing, i'm just sharing my love for win7.

without having used 7 it's hard to imagine it not being vista... so until then it's simply an idea you have in your head as to what 7 is like. it's not like 7 gives you a massage and makes you dinner or anything like that, but i would be sad if i had downgrade to vista or xp. remember all of the people actually downgrading from vista back to xp? you won't find much of the same with users downgrading from 7. 7 really is the sports coupe while xp is the old trusty sedan. both cars, one is just newer and nicer and easier to drive and has upgraded tech.

no, not quite what i was saying. it's a bit like people not bulldozing that old rickety shack down the road because it is of "historical value", when in reality it has served it's purpose and now needs to be lost to time. xp still works as far as i know, and supports older programs better than vista / 7. that's the trade-off though with advancement. at some point you need to get rid of the horse and cart to be able to fully utilize the v8 engine. 7 simply can't be a jack of all trades and fully support every program old and new. if you pony-up for one of the premium versions of 7 it comes with the ability to run stuff in a sandboxed xp environment within win7, much like the old dos command prompt running within xp.

just think of your own coding. surely you have dumped and / or rewritten some of your older functions as you've come to realizations about better ways to do certain things. same same. sometimes you have to dump the old to make things better. vista / 7 are inevitably incompatible with a lot of legacy programs simply because times have changed. for the most-part it does it's best to provide compatibility options with these programs (right click icon, compatibility, etc), but these don't guarantee success.

it's all very hard to describe until you use 7. UAC in 7 is as unobtrusive as it can be. vista was apparently a nightmare, but 7 is the culmination of the lessons learned from the mistakes made with vista. hence 7 is so nice to use in every way.

also, don't get confused with UAC and the sandbox concept. 2 separate things, but 2 likely issues people will face when using your plot news indi so i'm mentioning them together when maybe i should be explicitly speaking about them separately. UAC is simply giving permission for a program to make changes to the pc or not, and the sandbox is windows seamlessly keeping legacy program crud in a separate area away from windows.

they aren't. using win7 is just as easy, or even easier than xp. things are just a little different now due to it being newer. any of the complicated stuff that john doe wants to do is always going to be complicated no matter what OS he is using, but simple average users will know how to use win7 just as quick as a newcomer to xp if they are just an average user. it's like upgrading from win3.1 to 95. stuff changed, but was inevitably better. then from 95 to xp things changed again... at first it was confusing because it was new, but in the end it was better. now xp to 7 is the same again. newer, a bit different, but inevitably better. (NT, vista... black sheep of the family).

you haven't understood. they DON'T, and that's the point. win7 lets programs write to wherever they want. HOWEVER, if a program is a legacy program and wants to write to the windows folder or program files folder then win7 writes this file to the sandbox... BUT presents the file to the legacy program as though it was in the expected folder location.

or to put it another way, if a legacy program wants to write a file to program files oldprogram ... then win7 says "fine, no problem" and then proceeds to write the data into the sandbox area equivalent. when the legacy program wants to read a file from program files oldprogram ... then win7 says "cool cool" and first checks the program files oldprogram directory for the file, and if found points to the file, and then win7 also checks if the same file exists in the sandbox and if found redirects the pointer to the sandbox location instead. the program didn't have to do anything different than what it is coded to do, but windows 7 took care of pointing to the appropriate file. as far as the legacy program is concerned the file is being read/written to program files oldprogram , when in reality win7 is taking care of not letting a legacy program potentially crud any windows folder locations.

so, as i said with your plot news indi... if someone on 7 dumps the zip file contents into the progfiles directory and then runs the calendar exe to update the database they will see that the database and csv files seem to not get changed at all. this is because windows created newer versions and dumped them into the sandbox directory. it knows these are legacy programs and does not permit them to write to the progfiles directory. but if / when your indi goes to load the csv files win7 will correctly direct the file pointer to the sandbox directory so your indi will still seamlessly work. but it's going to confuse the hell out of someone digging around in the csv files located in the progfiles directory... these files will never change because windows will never permit the legacy programs to write to this location.

the programs don't have to be coded any differently else no legacy program would work, right? the problem is when users start digging around places they aren't meant to be digging around, hence average Joe shouldn't be in these places anyway and should never get themselves confused about where files are and are not located.

you shouldn't. but you have to appreciate that with newer software that older software will eventually run into speed bumps and find compatibility issues. because windows takes steps to protect itself from malware there are going to be instances where there are issues. there might be an admin permissions issue, or someone won't find a file where they expect it to be (because it's actually safely tucked-away in the sandbox instead of the main windows area). issues are going to arise with software no matter what, but running old programs on new OS's is always potentially conflict-ridden. you can't expect to run old Dos games on 7, for example.

mt4 is old. that's the bottom line really.

on my laptop i suddenly had issues with logging into my trading account in mt4. my desktop mt4 logged in fine, but my laptop suddenly stopped connecting to my broker. both are running win7. i thought to myself "ok great. i've run into some win7 mystery admin rights issue preventing mt4 from working. how annoying and unexpected and uncool". as it turns out it seems to have been a conflict with AVG antivirus which i had on the laptop but not my desktop (i don't even know why i put avg on. i actually didn't mean to. it was a brain fart which i then paid for in this example). for all intents and purposes i believed it was some win7 admin permissions issue and tried reinstalling mt4 as administrator, not as admin, not as admin but running the installer with admin permissions.... and any other combo you can think of.

as it turns out it wasn't even win7 being the issue. it was avg conflicting. i dropped avg and installed the same antivirus as i run on my desktop and voila, mt4 runs perfectly normal again.

point is, win7 has UAC to stop malware secretly running in the background writing or deleting files or changing registry values etc, and win7 also has the sandbox area where legacy program file writes are dumped into. these are simply not an issue in any shape or form for an everyday person using their pc as windows is taking care of business and mostly keeps out of your way. it does the leg-work for you and programs.

vista UAC wasn't crash hot from what i've heard... but seriously, the only time i even realize i have UAC on in win7 is when i first click the mt4 icon to run mt4. "Do you want to allow this program to make changes to this computer?" - "yes". done. mt4 is running. if i run something like a older dvd ripping software then i will again have to click yes when i run it. but, running firefox or the latest version of VLC player or msn or media center or (lol) minesweeper etc etc doesn't require me to do a thing. it's only the unknown unsafe older exe's that windows bothers you about. innocuous recent exe's that windows knows about it doesn't care a damn about and you run without windows asking a single question.

UAC is as unobtrusive as it possibly could be.

if you can't already tell, i really like win7. from the slideshow desktop background, to the simple icons in the taskbar and the way win7 manages multiple windows etc, aero, the desktop widgets like the weather, the hover button on the bottom right corner that instantly shows your desktop when the mouse is above it instead of having to click anything... and above all things the most simple UI implementation that i use every single day is how you can drag a windows title bar to the left edge of your screen for windows to automatically resize the window to fill the left half of your monitor, and similarly dragging to the right edge, or dragging a titlebar to the top auto-fills the entire screen. simple alignment stuff but so convenient.

there is more i'm sure, but now i need to take a cold shower

for all of my waffling i could probably summarize my general points as follows:

whether or not you agree, the plot news indi really is a work of true old-skool hackage. you've bent the rules and design of mt4 and mql to make it do things it wasn't really designed to do. when you incorporate this roundabout trickery that makes mt4 do things beyond it's normal capabilities with a newer operating system that does things in a newer and different way then you start running into odd situations that couldn't be anticipated.

the thing is that it's not even just your indi that people have issues with. they don't understand where their newly compiled indi's are going to. they don't understand where the log files are writing to. they don't understand where mt4 is writing the chart history to.... basically, they don't know about the sandbox and so are dumbfounded.

rip mt4 into a safe location and windows will stop sandboxing everything and the file structure will be exactly as the user expects from that point onwards.

another little bit of fanboy service for win7 is something i forgot about... i have my 360 network bridged with my desktop and access the net through the wireless dongle attached to the desktop which communicates with the wireless router and so on. sometimes i get issues where windows does spaz and has an ip conflict or something due to the network bridge (i think usually randomly after freshly booting. it's a low occurrence so not sure).

instead of me having to mess around trying to debug the issue and uninstall the wireless dongle or get in amongst the network bridge settings and whatever other possible places i could go and look to resolve the problem all i actually have to do is right click on the wireless icon in the system tray next to the clock, click troubleshoot, and within 20 seconds windows has identified the network bridge as having some conflict with itself, resets the settings for the network bridge, resets the wireless network adapter, reconnects the wireless dongle with the wireless router, and BANG everything is running perfectly normal. windows did all the leg-work for me. all i had to do was right click and select troubleshoot and then click yes.

7 really does try it's best to do all of the hard work for a user. nothing is ever perfect, but i don't remember xp being as user friendly and self-diagnosing as win7 is.

ok i should shut up now. i think it's clear i love win7 >-------- THIS ------< much.

Wow, thanks for the detailed expositions.

I don't understand what you're saying about the sandbox. I'll read it again when I'm less tired, perhaps it will make more sense.

Simple fact is --- no matter how many nice new features Win7 might have, it has created Q&A with the indys that I've created, that I don't have the facilities to troubleshoot. All the indys are doing is reading and writing to the ..../experts/files folder. That works fine with XP, my view is that the fact that it causes problems with Vista/Win7 as a real nuisance. Sure there are workarounds (like installing MT4 other than under Program Files), but the point is that people aren't using them, and that is creating unnecessary problems for me.

That's it from me --- I've said all that I wanted to in my prior posts; no point in repeating myself.

if you saw it in action you'd understand immediately what i mean. it sounds complicated only because i can't describe it well.

the issues with indi's working or not working, or half working and any other combination in between is because people aren't appreciating that they are running old software (mt4) on a new OS that it was never designed for. if people would take the very simple steps to make it compatible then 99% of issues would be gone.

as you said... just tell them you won't help them. or just stick the very first instruction in any help files to be "if using vista / win 7 MOVE MT4 OUT OF THE PROGRAM FILES DIRECTORY!!!". problems resolved, except for people who can't read simple instructions.

if you do go back and re-read the bit about the sandbox (my name. i don't know what microsoft refers to it as) then think in terms of pointer variable types as opposed to static variables. you can be stuck with a statically addressed variable, or you could instead use a pointer that can reference anywhere. when a legacy program wants to read or write to the program files directory windows says that's perfectly ok, but instead of actually writing to this location windows has instead pointed to the sandbox. for all intents and purposes reading and writing to program files is being done to program files as far as the legacy program is concerned... but windows has done a sneaky and actually referred the reading or writing to a different location without anyone knowing or needing to know.

Why don't do you merge your indicator and this
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=19293
and historical news?

I haven't looked at Derk's indy for several months now. I understand that other programmers have added to it since then.

The indy in this thread is capable of displaying both historical and upcoming news, a rolling countdown of upcoming announcements, chart and e-mail alerts, some reasonably complex filtering, exports in a variety of user-defined formats, and other customizable settings.

What benefits would there be in merging the two?

I've added a zip file of news events from 1 Jan 2007 thru 22 Oct 2011 into the attachments at the foot of post #1.

Unzip it into your ....../[MT4]/experts/files folder, overwriting any existing files of the same name.

Very interesting, many thanks.

Just a thought -- has anyone on Windows 7 tried running this through a session of IDA pro to see where the bug may lie? Unfortunately my reverse engineering / debugging isn't up to scratch, especially with Windows. And, I've only been looking at / coding MQL4 for a whole two weeks or so.

Dear coder,

I install indicators and scripts and run on mt4 latest update on windows 7!

I set the right gmt offset in indi recent news and also right in the programe for download news!

I then run indi, run script to download news BUT i get the news in wrong date, for example today italian news show after hours that was released on my chart

I also run the calc time,

What do you think about it and what should i do?

is this a cash after a new download that may be result it?

i confused!

You should not change the settings in the news downloader (FFcal.EXE) --- this is for experienced users only. Leave the 'Number of hours' fields there set to zero. Otherwise (given that you've made non-zero entries in the Recent News indy's parameters), the time shifts will be performed twice.

One point about running the Calc Timeshifts script: to get the correct results, you must run it while the market is open.

Thanks alot for making this indicator. It has been very helpful for me!

One question though: is there a way to disable the indicators symbols for different time frames? I've tried the standard way, disabling the timeframes in the indicator properties window that I do not need, but the indicator does not react to these settings. Any other settings I could try to prevent the symbols from showing up in daily charts for example, but not lower timeframes?

I followed all steps and successfully installed NewsSetup v3-11.zip

recent news is blank.

it is now displaying news headlines.

below is the screen shot.

Can anybody help???

http://www.forexfactory.com/attachme...1&d=1324730393

@herbun: from p7 of the instruction document:

TimeFrames — the plotted news events will display only on the timeframes that you specify. Entries may be upper or lowercase, and must be separated by commas.
________________________

@OnlyProfitFX: the indicator is behaving correctly. From instructions in post #1:

Recent News v310 indy (download into ...../experts/indicators folder) --- new parameters:

MainChart:

1. TRUE = plots both the circular symbols and rolling window in the main chart window, exactly as before. Note that v3.10 must create a new sub-window regardless, due to MT4 idiosyncrasies. Drag the separator to make this empty sub-window as small as possible (or use v 3.03 instead)
2. FALSE = plots both the circular symbols and rolling window in a separate chart sub-window. Use VertSpacingPips, SymbolSize, etc to adjust symbol spacing (and/or drag MT4's between-widow separator), and ShowUpcomingXEvents, EventCorner, EventFontSize, etc to likewise adjust the rolling window of impending events.

It worked after reinstalled, set vertspacingpips to 10, change time suggested by cal timeshifts.

Many Thanks and Merry Christmas :-)

It is the weekend - there is no news until market opens. You are showing history but no headlines in your screen shot.

i see headlines now, check.....

http://www.forexfactory.com/attachme...1&d=1324799602