There are situations where we may need to run certain code components just once, e.g. to initialize some static variables before auto-trading execution or perform some tasks (such as ranking) at the very beginning of backtest or exploration. The following techniques may be useful in such cases:
When we want to execute certain part of code just once after starting AmiBroker, we may use a flag written to a static variable that would indicate if our initialization has been triggered or not.
if( Nz( StaticVarGet("InitializationDone") ) == 0 ) { StaticVarSet("InitializationDone", 1); // code for first execution }
If we want to run certain part of code at the beginning of the test run in Analysis window, we can use:
if ( Status("stocknum") == 0 ) { // our code here }
When Status(“stocknum”) is detected in the code, then execution is performed in a single thread for the very first symbol. Only after processing of this first symbol has finished the other threads will start.
A practical example showing use of this feature is presented in the following tutorial: