ZOrder out of control

[NinjaTrader_DaveI]

Thank you for giving this some thought and sharing your feedback. I've aggregated all of these suggestions into Tracking ID # SFT-710.

[jhowinvest]

I agree that we need a way to help with the zorder. I attached a picture of my situation where I have the bars numbered and two ema's on the screen. I would like the candles as the top z-order but they are currently order 589. The grey ema is currently z-order 1 and I would have to scroll wheel through 588 items to put the ema behind the candles. I have tried setting zorder of the ema to (-1) but that isn't working. I would like a way to have the indicator that draws the bar numbers to put all of it's drawings at one zorder level. There may be an easier way to accomplish this and if so please let me know. Thank you.

[dalebru]

Thanks Dave! Some grouping or other method is definitely needed; otherwise, shift+mousewheel is useless. If nothing else, shift+mousewheel should treat objects drawn by an indicator to be the same group. I had guessed that was the point of changing the draw methods to take the "owner" parameter. I would say maybe a configuration setting where you can configure the grouping that shift+mousewheel uses would be good. The setting can have the option of no grouping or grouping by owner/bar/plots/drawing and like you suggested, owner/bar/plots/drawingtype. Could also add the option of specifying a zorder group name on each drawing object.

I agree with wbennettjr and would like to add a feature request that the shift+mousewheel approach be augmented with a zorder dialog popped up by context menu. That dialog would list all the objects and allow me to reorder them. I think that would be much faster and would also solve a problem with selecting an object hidden under a band painted by another indicator.

[wbennettjr]

Thanks Dave! Some grouping or other method is definitely needed; otherwise, shift+mousewheel is useless. If nothing else, shift+mousewheel should treat objects drawn by an indicator to be the same group. I had guessed that was the point of changing the draw methods to take the "owner" parameter. I would say maybe a configuration setting where you can configure the grouping that shift+mousewheel uses would be good. The setting can have the option of no grouping or grouping by owner/bar/plots/drawing and like you suggested, owner/bar/plots/drawingtype. Could also add the option of specifying a zorder group name on each drawing object.

[NinjaTrader_DaveI]

I see, thank you. You are interpreting it correctly. Each individual object is going to add a new Z-Order level to the chart. We do this so that you will never run into an issue where you want one specific object to paint over another specific object, but cannot do so due to a lack of Z-Order levels, or Z-Orders grouped by object type, or a similar restriction. This way, you have precise control over which objects are above/below which other objects.

That being said, I can see the value in something like an optional "Z-Order Group" for object types (plots, bars, drawing objects), or even for different types of drawing objects (lines, rectangles, etc.). I'll be happy to log a suggestion so we can start to track demand on this feature, if you would like.

[wbennettjr]

Thanks for your response Dave.

I don't have thousands of bars but I have about five indicators and a couple of them draw text or other objects on each bar. It seems that each object for each bar is being treated as having its own zorder. So, if I draw a text object on five bars, I think I would have zorder being five plus the order of the other indicators and bars. It looks like the plots are correct - just seems to be an issue with custom drawn objects.

[NinjaTrader_DaveI]

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback. So that I can understand the implications a bit better -- when you say thousands of Z-Order levels, would that imply that an indicator is drawing text on thousands of historical bars? Do you see a number of Z-Order levels equal to the number of objects on the chart (by a rough estimate), or are you seeing hundreds or thousands of Z-Order levels with, say, only dozens of objects on the chart?

[wbennettjr]

Changing the zorder for chart objects is next to impossible now. If there are several (or even one) indicators that draw several objects (say a text object per bar), trying to change the zorder (shift + mouse wheel), shows hundreds or thousands of zorder levels.