Alerts train-wreck unequivocally confirmed, again

[brucerobinson]

See this thread https://ninjatrader.com/support/foru...ations-changes

Hello Patrick,
I can confirm pretty much without doubt that what I suspected & reported in the above linked thread to be the case, plus some additional unusual outcomes.

Why, is over to you/development to determine.

I followed your example as requested, and found a further bug.

The example you asked me to replicate was not the scenario I had provided, hence of dubious value.

I've emailed you separately as to my suspicions and the rationale behind therm.

But for the benefit of others who may experience similar torture, I think it best to keep it alive on the Forum so at least they may be spared repeated abuse, unlike me.

I'm not prepared to spend many many more hours running around following your 'diagnostics' as I do not find and have not in the past found that approach to be efficient or effective.
If you wish to remote in to my machine, and wish to listen, I will gladly show you what is going on and provide some narrative, walk you through it which will hopefully assist you in improving the software.

It is then up to your developers to figure out why and what to do about it.

I, meantime will set about rebuilding all my alerts for the second time.

My advice to other users who have not yet started to use Alerts is don't. My advice to Ninja is don't release features unless better thought through and more thoroughly tested.

Kind regards
Bruce

[brucerobinson]

Given that I didn't get an acknowledgement or response to this it may suggest Support/Development aren't interested in the issue or resolving it.
However ever hopeful that isn't so, FYI

I rebuilt my Alerts.

I am pretty certain as follows is what is happening....

My charts contain a few indicators (simple stock Ninja High/Low, but I do not believe it is relevant what they are - I believe the issue will be pervasive on any/all).
I added Alerts that use these indicators as Conditions, to charts.

I needed to change the Z-Order of the Indicators on the charts
To do so, I used the Up/Down function in the Indicators dialogue (it was not practical using Select/Shirt/Scroll)

I encountered problems and contacted Support. Thread posted above but not necessary to peruse - it simply identified another QA problem with Z-Order

This is the important bit - the crux of the issue:
To ensure the indicator re-ordering, I added a NEW instance of the indicator that I wanted to have at a higher Z-Order on my chart (it therefore appeared at the bottom of my Indicator List with highest Z-Order).
I then DELETED the equivalent pre-existing Indicator in the list and moved the new one up to occupy its position in the List.

What I subsequently found is that my Alerts were corrupted.

What I am now pretty certain of is that if you have Alerts attached to Indicators and remove an Indicator from your charts, all Alerts attached to indicators below the removed indicator will be corrupted insofar as the Conditions will 'move up'.

Think of it like an Excel spreadsheet table - you remove an entire Row EXCEPT its Label in Column 1 - it shifts Cells up (it asks you if you want to do this!) and all Labels are then out of kilter with their corresponding rows by one row.

I am fairly confident this is what is happening having experienced the same replicated outcome on tens of examples.

Hopefully this is sufficient for someone in Development who knows how it hangs together to think about how this is so. But I am pretty convinced it is so...….

It isn't right. It shouldn't.

Kind regards

Bruce

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Sorry for the delay, we on the development team were actually looking into this and trying to test/reproduce and even review code to see what might have been going wrong. We so far havn't been able to but I still should have provided an update. I will review the new information you posted to see if it will help us track this down.

[brucerobinson]

Thanks.
I recognise it understandably isn't likely to be a highest priority issue, but at the same time I'm pretty convinced there's a problem which will likely come back to haunt if/when more users use Alerts.
For me, it is now no longer a problem because I've 'fixed' it by re-doing all the 'associations' between the two sides of the Conditions, and don't anticipate making any further changes to this. However I would be extremely reticent about doing so because of the apparent 'fragility'. I remove an indicator from the list and doing so breaks all Alerts Condition associations in the list below it i.e. the consequence is not just one broken, it is multiplied affecting however many are below the one indicator removed. Not knowing it is occurring, doing it on 18 charts is gargantuan.
If you need any further clarification, let me know & if I can assist I will.
Kind regards,
Bruce