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AmiBroker TA Course

Real-Time Charts

A chart that has stopped receiving data looks exactly like a chart that is receiving data on a quiet instrument. Both redraw on schedule. Both show a last bar. Both print a clock in the title that advances every second. The difference between them is invisible unless something in your layout is specifically measuring it — and in most layouts, nothing is.

That is the problem this part exists to solve, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the one intraday failure that costs money silently. Every other fault in AmiBroker announces itself. A formula error prints in the pane. A bad import shows up as a spike you can see. A broken backtest produces numbers no sane person would believe. A frozen feed produces a picture that is perfectly plausible and no longer true, and it will keep producing it for as long as you leave the machine running.

The distinction the whole part turns on

Section titled “The distinction the whole part turns on”

The feed writing new bars into the database and a chart pane redrawing itself are two different events. They run on separate clocks, either can happen without the other, and confusing them is the root of nearly every report that an intraday chart is broken.

Once you hold the two apart, diagnosis becomes cheap. Is the pane still executing? If not, the causes are a short list about visibility, sheets and refresh settings. If it is, the causes are a different short list about feeds, subscriptions, sessions and replay. Answering that one question first removes about half the possibilities before you have looked at anything else.

This part therefore teaches the distinction before it teaches any layout technique, and every formula in it reports both clocks side by side, because a number that measures only one of them tells you nothing on its own.

What you will be able to do

Section titled “What you will be able to do”
  • Choose a chart interval knowing what it costs in bars, memory, threads and refresh time, and explain why the database’s base interval sets a floor that no display setting can dig under.
  • Say which intervals your edition and your feed actually make available, rather than which ones appear in a menu.
  • Read the plugin connection state, and know which of its four values recovers on its own and which one never will.
  • Build a multi-window layout in which symbol linking and interval linking are set separately, one window is locked to a reference symbol, and every window states what it is showing.
  • Diagnose a frozen chart from evidence AmiBroker genuinely exposes, in about ninety seconds.
  • Keep a stale-data monitor that measures the gap between now and the last time data moved, says UNKNOWN when it has nothing to measure, and raises one alert per episode rather than one per refresh.

Editions, feeds, and completing this part without paying anything

Section titled “Editions, feeds, and completing this part without paying anything”

Some of what follows is edition-gated, and the course is specific about which parts rather than waving at the question. Tick and N-second charts, the GetRTData() family, the every-tick chart refresh mode and the “wait for backfill” option are documented as Professional-edition features. Streaming quote display and Time & Sales windows are available in both editions with documented symbol limits. Pages in this part that assume a live feed are marked accordingly in their frontmatter and carry a Professional callout.

None of that stops you completing this part. Every page gives a path that works with no subscription, and those paths are not consolation prizes:

  • The interval, memory and thread arithmetic is identical on an intraday database built from historical text files, which is what Part 19 shows you how to create.
  • The distinction between the two clocks is easier to see with no feed attached than with one, because the data clock is then permanently stopped and the contrast is total.
  • The lab’s layout is built and verified identically under Bar Replay over stored intraday bars. Bar Replay truncates data for every symbol at the playback position, so a linked multi-window layout replays in step with no extra work, and you control the clock rather than waiting for a market to open.
  • The stale-data monitor works with a plugin, without a plugin and under replay, because it falls back from the plugin’s own update stamp to the end of the newest bar. Provoking a stale state on demand — press PAUSE in Bar Replay — is a better rehearsal than waiting for a real outage.

What you cannot reproduce without a feed is the plugin status area itself, and the honest response to that is to learn the four states and their documented recovery behaviour rather than to pretend otherwise.

How the part is arranged

Section titled “How the part is arranged”

The first lesson establishes what an interval choice actually commits you to, in bars, memory, threads and refresh cost, because every later decision is priced in those units. The second draws the line between the feed updating and the chart repainting and gives you a two-clock panel that makes the line visible. The lab builds the layout, links it, saves it properly and verifies it, with the Bar Replay version treated as a first-class path rather than an appendix. The challenge then breaks it, hands you the evidence AmiBroker actually exposes, and ends with the monitor that makes the diagnosis unnecessary next time.

Work through them in order. The lab’s status strip assumes the two-clock idea from the second lesson, and the challenge’s monitor is a direct extension of the lab’s strip.

A note on scope: this part stops at the chart. Reading live quote fields from AFL, controlling refresh rates properly and writing context-aware formulas are Part 23; the quote and Time & Sales windows are Part 22; alerts are Part 25; and Bar Replay as a practice discipline, with an honest account of what it does and does not simulate, is Part 26.

Part21 of 36Level5 — Real-Time AmiBroker UserPages4Estimated time2.3 hours

4 of 4 pages in this part need the Professional edition or a live data feed, marked below. Every one of them has a Level A path that uses Bar Replay and historical data instead, so the part can be completed in full without a subscription.

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