Time and Sales download of an empty symbol

[nedibe]

How can I know if a symbol has no time and sales history.

I would like to automate my time and sales download for futures but sometimes I have in my file symbol that have no history like ES H5.

I'm using an event to download my time and sales one by one, since isTimeSalesReady return false I can't continue to the next symbol and I'm blocked.

Is there a solution?

Thanks,
Nick.

[nedibe]

forgot to say that ishistoryready returns true for ES H5 which is nice.

So Genspoo it might be a bug to report to the dev team.

[GenSpoo]

Hi Nick,

I'm a little confused (maybe just tired ), but I think you said

"since isTimeSalesReady return false"

and then corrected that by saying...

"ishistoryready returns true for ES H5"

I guess my question is, were you correcting your first post about the behaviour of IsTimeSalesReady with respect to all non-data providing symbols? If so, I don't see it as a bug report as much as a feature request to have some means of determining if a symbol is valid before requesting data for it, yes?

I think I read on another thread from a developer that they don't have a way of doing that either. They send a request to the datamanager and they either do or don't get back data. My memory on that reply is a bit fuzzy though. Although the quote window in the main app does return a "No Data." very quickly on a bad symbol, so I guess the question is what is the mechanism they are using to determine that (or are they just putting up No Data until data comes in, since the chart window waits for ever and never complains). So maybe they really don't have an "invalid symbol" mechanism?

Cheers... George

[nedibe]

I'm confused.

what I mean is that ishistoryReady is working great for ES H5, it returns that the history is ready despite the fact that there is 0 bar.

istimesalesready is not working because it ALWAYS returns FALSE for ES H5, no matter how long you wait.

ES H5 is a valid symbol, there is simply no history or time and sales data yet on it.

Thanks,
Nick.

[GenSpoo]

Silly me. I my mind is playing tricks on me. I read the first "istimesalesready" and my mind converted the "ishistoryready" into another "istimesalesready". So it looked to me like you were contradicting yourself. I'm awake now, I promise.

Originally posted by nedibe
what I mean is that ishistoryReady is working great for ES H5, it returns that the history is ready despite the fact that there is 0 bar.

istimesalesready is not working because it ALWAYS returns FALSE for ES H5, no matter how long you wait.

I suppose which one is working is a matter of preference as to what should be returned in this case. Either way, I would agree that if there is no data (or the symbol is invalid), isHistoryReady and isTimeSalesReady should both return true or both return false, depending on your opinion. True would be nice because you could then check the number of bars (or time and sales), if it is zero, you would assume an invalid symbol (I would still sort of consider ES H5 and invalid symbol, even though it will be valid in the future). A return value of false on both does kind of leave you hanging.

Cheers... George

[nedibe]

a return value of false for is historyready would be very bad, because I would stay blocked on this symbol during my download.

[LTANESIGNAL]

Good question,

So what does IsTimeSalesReady officially return when we have no data? Both true and false and even blocking make sense.

[Guest]

It returns FALSE if there is no data. There is a new function called IsSymbolValid() which returns a BOOLEAN if the symbol is valid or not in the 7.7 Release Candidate, which will be available in the middle of this month.