Develica Share Discussion Threads

[eithin] 26/6/2017 09:23

Had problems towards close on Friday. Today has stopped updating about 15 minutes ago. When I put mouse on the DDE active icon I get "41 active stocks" but not updating my excel spread sheet.

[optimist] 23/6/2017 10:50

Hi Ruslan

I have also tried to use DDE with a large number of stocks and get the same problems that DavR0s has reported. It seems that your DDE client has a limit of a few hundred conections although this varies. I've tried it with Excel and Libre Office with similar results, so that points to your client as the limitation.

Could you ask your developer what the limits should be or put them in touch with me.

Regards

Optimist

[davr0s] 23/6/2017 09:11

Hi Ruslan1

I appreciate you have probably had others things to sort out this week but can I have some attention on the outstanding issue (above) of a week ago where files >>500 DDE entries consistently fail to load.

I want to get ADVFN working but what with this, the feed stopping at random and this weeks issues I am spending more time working around the instabilities of the DDE program than actually trading/investing. I have previously used Yahoo (free) and its far more stable (although I know if can be withdrawn at a moments notice - but that said its been there for years) - and had to resort back to it this week.

My trial expires Wednesday and I am in two minds whether to continue taking the service until I can be confident that my entries will load reliably. My current instinct is to pause subscription and try another provider (more expensive so not my preferred route). Alternatively maybe you can extend the trail whilst we get to the bottom of the issues.

I dont expect the service to be perfect all the time but it has to be sufficiently robust that I am not spending a disproportionate amount of time fixing issues created by it.

Let me know the way forwards. Kind regards Davud

[davr0s] 23/6/2017 08:46

Lots of open values absent this morning even though there is traded volume. eg FIF has an open value of 0 but 60k shares traded. Picked it up on DDE but monitor showing no open value either. Is this a new issue (PS I can appreciate/understand zero if there is no volume but this is not the case here). There are lots of other examples today too so its not FIF specific

[kenbachelor] 21/6/2017 18:40

DavR0s - I've got no problem at the moment.

[davr0s] 21/6/2017 17:26

Hi Ruslan - any update on the post above - I am in my 1 month trial and I am trying to evaluate how reliable and stable this facility this is.

In addition this afternoon the feed just stopped streaming twice (no error) and at 4-30 it completely died (cant even log in) so I had to revert to Yahoo..... ThanksDavid

[davr0s] 17/6/2017 10:43

Hi Ruslan

Thanks for your contact - I think I have covered off most of your questions in the last post but would welcome any technical input, solutions or workarounds as its a bit of a pain having to workaround this.

Also if it helps I can send you my test sheet that fails - as noted above the list is autogenerated but even manually typing them in afterwards can fail too - so i believe the test data is sound.

Thanks David

[davr0s] 17/6/2017 10:40

Hi Optimist

Appreciate your reply and assistance again.

Id be very interested in your routine that stops and starts DDE.

Couple of further clarifications and findings:

I now have a spreadsheet with only DDE links in it (more specifically up to 2000 shares with open/close/high/low/volume values). If I open this i find it can start to fail some of the DDE links from rows 600ish upwards

If I select some of the fails and just reenter the formula some work. But occasionally one will hard fail in that even if i completely clear the cell and manually type the formula back it will not load. It's as if the DDE client has failed and is saying you aint connecting to this share in this session. The only solution is to kill excel and the DDE client and retry - this is my biggest roadblock

If I reduce the sheet to 200 i find it loads everytime so I assume the DDE cant reliably load a large number of shares in one go. However, if I chunk it up adding 200 at a time it will load the lot - been over 2000 shares now. So my workaround is to load 200, pause, load 200 more etc etc The good news is once loaded it seems to be rock steady.

I am running a pretty high spec PC - an HP z600 with 16 cores, 3GHz and lots of memory, plus my broadband is 35MBs+

I am not sure its the recalc either as it fails on the first calculation when I open the test sheet up.

As my list of shares is different every day I have written VB that creates all my DDE formulae (I know that's not the issue as I can connect all the DDE links at times as described above), plus when I generate these all the calculations are turned off. I turn all these DDE formulae off with a bulk copy-paste special again from within VB though interestingly I see that the DDE client at the bottom of my screen doesnt appear to release these. I have to close the spreadsheet to achieve that.

Also im using Excel 2016 (32 bit) on windows 7 sp1 (just as an aside I tried 64 bit excel and Windows10 last week to test the speed of the rest of my program and it was noticeably slower (about 20% for my big screening routines) so I plan to stick with what I am running.

Cheers, David

[ruslan1] 15/6/2017 13:56

DavR0s,

Please accept our apologies for not replying earlier.
Can you please let us know whether you are experiencing the same issue with a new spreadsheet and entering formulas manually.

Please also provide the details of the software that you are using with DDE and how you disable stocks and formulas.

Kind regards,

Ruslan
ADVFN

[optimist] 14/6/2017 23:41

Hi David

First an apology, I have just checked the website and it appears to be a very old version which although it still seems to work, I have made improvements over the years.

To launch, reload and stop the DDE client, I have a stand alone program with a decent UI to configure the login details. The only downside is that it has to be installed and the setup program is not signed. So you have to decide if you trust it.

My spreadsheet calls this program when loading and I have macros that can use it within Excel to start or stop the DDE client.

As regards your problems, I rarely have to do more than click my Update DDE Links button and I don't have to close the worksheet. One thing that I always do, is keep all my DDE data on a separate tab and use vlookup formulae to get the data into my main spreadsheets. It may be that makes it more stable. You could also have the DDE formulae in a completely worksheet which may prevent your main worksheet crashing - hopefully you would only have to close and reload the DDE worksheet. Of course, depending on your computer spec, using vlookup() on 2000 stock could overload the computer, but it's worth a try.

I wonder if the problem is to do with the worksheet recalculation, have you tried setting manual recalc and writing a macro to recalc once every few seconds?

For tour EOD calculation, it should be possible to write a macro to grab individal DDE values and insert them into your worksheet. Of course this would be too slow to be of benifit during trading hours.

I'm interested to know how you disable all but 200 stocks on the DDE and then re enable another section.

If you would like the DDE Client Launcher then please PM me your email address. You obviously are OK with VB so I can send you my current macros as well. Up to date versions of the spreadsheet templates may take longer.

What version of Excel are you using?

Optimist

[davr0s] 14/6/2017 16:11

Hi Optimist

No i hadnt seen that - many thanks for these. I am working my way through these to see if they address my issue but nothing jumps out. Today I had to open and close my excel sheet and exit/re login hald a dozen times to advfn before it would load all my DDE links which is a real pain - but onces it has linked its sold all day. Have you experienced this and more importantly have you found a way around it? Also when I turn off my DDE formula i am often left with a rogue ticker still connected - it as if the DDE load up corrupts one or two and then gets stuck and the only solution is a restart which is not a long term solution for me. Thanks David

[optimist] 12/6/2017 13:08

David

Have you checked out this thread

There is a link to 'My ADVFN DDE Page' that contains a spreadsheet with formulae builder and a utility to start, stop and reload the DDE.

I haven't updated the page recently, as no one appears to be interested but if you have problems let me know. I have a version that runs on the latest Windows/Excel.

I haven't tried 200+ stocks but I know that some people have used more than this. The only problem that I get is occasionally, DDE will freeze or disconect but all I have to do is click a button on my spreadsheet and it reloads.

Optimist

[davr0s] 11/6/2017 18:48

Hi everyone, I am trying out DDE on a trial basis and have a question. Hope someone can help.

I have an existing excel spreadsheet and have replaced my cells with DDE commands. The share tickers in my sheet change everyday and there are quite a few, so I have had to write vb code that autogenerate all my DDE formula- have encountered a few initial issues but now overcome - so I can autogenerate several hundred DDE commands at the press of a button.

This works some of the time without a hitch but there are glitches which is a pain as it crashes my excel program

What I find is that for data sets >200ish it will occasionally throw up an error when connecting to DDE. So i might get 799/800 DDE commands connect.

So i enhanced my software so if there is an error it clears and retries that cell. This works some of the time. So I am left with a cell with a correctly formatted DDE command that simple wont connect even if i clear the cell and manually retype it. I find that the DDE connection process has invariably thrown up an error message prior to this.

This seems to occur with lists >>200. As I need an EOD market view (ie 2000+ shares in the UK) i thought Id chunk the data up into 200 blocks so there are only ever 200 shares connected at anyone time. However what I find is that when I clear the first 200 cells data so there are no formula that the DDE icon at the bottom indicates that the shares havent all been released ie they are still showing as connected. To confuse matters sometimes it releases all the shares (or maybe there is 1 left which itself is confusing). So now I'm stuck as the only fix at this point is to kill the DDE process and close down excel and try again.

I can see several ways possibly to attack this but because there is no option in DDE that clears things out (ie if there are no DDE formulae why is it still connected sometimes?) I have hit a roadblock.

I hope those that have used the DDE function with decent volume can understand and can hopefully offer some help please!

Thanks David

[kenbachelor] 15/5/2017 11:04

Apologies - I posted this on the wrong support thread.

Any thoughts on why I can't connect to my DDE this morning?

[eithin] 13/1/2017 08:25

Re-booted now OK.

[eithin] 13/1/2017 08:05

No DDE today "connection to ADVFN has been lost"

[kenbachelor] 07/12/2016 16:13

Thank you Andrea, it's installed and working now.

[andrea196] 07/12/2016 14:20

KenBachelor,

Thank you for your post. Sorry for the late reply to your email today, you should have now received an email with the link to the page from where you can download the DDE software. However, this can also be useful for other user. The link to download and install the ADVFN DDE Software can be found on our 'Download monitor' page:

Regards,

Andrea
ADVFN Support

[kenbachelor] 07/12/2016 12:55

I've sent e-mail messages to support twice, but haven't received a reply.

At the bottom of the upgrades page there used to be a link to download your DDE. I need to install it onto a new computer, but I can't find the link.

[eithin] 29/3/2016 12:19

1220- Back in business here.

[ruslan1] 29/3/2016 11:43

Dear Users,

We are currently experiencing a problem with our DDE software.
Our developers are actively looking into that.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Kind Regards,

Ruslan
ADVFN Support

[eithin] 29/3/2016 11:31

DDE packed up. "Can't connect to ADVFN. Try again?" rebooted, cleared the cache still no good.

[eithin] 06/10/2015 21:11

Rolled back to win 7. DDE all OK again all as I need.Believe win 7 supported till 2020 so will stick with it.

[ray_d] 06/10/2015 08:29

Hi,

We had some of our users yesterday have some issues with DDE on Windows 10. For them it was the antivirus software (Windows Defender) which was causing Excel to crash at start up. If using Windows Defender, please check to ensure that Excel isn't be blocked in any way.

If it continues to crash though, please could you let us know antivirus software you are running and also the build of Windows 10. To find out the build:
* press windows key + R
* In the Run dialog, type winver and press Enter.

Ray

[kenbachelor] 06/10/2015 07:51

Optimist - Mine isn't working this morning.