Determining which bars are currently on screen

Hi guys,

I'm writing an indicator (NT 8 Beta) which labels the bars with their number, 1 being the first bar of the session.

I'm using Draw.Text and the indicator works fine - EXCEPT it appears to be consuming too much in the way of resources. Moving the mouse/cursor over a chart becomes very laggy as does performing any manual operation such as scrolling through the chart, using a drawing tool. This is because around 9,000 drawing objects are created (the number of bars in the chart).

Is there a way of determining which bars are visible on screen so that I could create those drawing objects only on the fly, significantly reducing the number of drawing objects existing at any one time and thus, hopefully, improving performance?

Thanks for your post.

One of the improvement over NT7 that we added in NT8 was the ability to see the bars ago and the current bar numbers.

Please open a "databox" window (Left click on the charts toolbar 6th icon from the left to open the data box). In the databox, right mouse click then select "show bar indexes" and/or "show bars ago". These will add two rows in the databox showing bar index 999 of 9999 and bars ago of 99.

I already played with those features but unfortunately I need the count to reset at the start of the trading session. So the first bar of the day's trading session is always #1 etc.

However, you've given me an idea. Instead of using Draw.Text, why don't I create an indicator which holds the index number of the current session as its value but doesn't plot anything. Then, I should be able to read the value of the indicator in the Data Box. This should be much more efficient in terms of resources.

Going to try it now.

I have the following simple code, but for some reason I can't get it to display even the indicator name in the Data Box. Oddly, if I remove the assignment to Value[0], the indicator's name now appears in the Data Box but obviously no values. Any ideas? Thanks.