Profiles
Hi folks,
We have talked in a pervious article about the templates in MetaTrader and we have know the importance of using template for saving our setting of the chart and attached expert advisor and indicators
Today we are going to talk about using profiles which enables you to save a group of working charts and their settings.
We can say that Profiles are group of templates.
What are the profiles anyway?
The profile is a set of templates and charts setting stored together in the MetaTrader 4\profiles path. These charts and setting can be uploaded to the terminal at any time.
Saving settings to a profile:
Every profile is saved in a unique folder in the profiles path. The name of the folder is the name of the profile itself; for example: default profile is stored in default folder and Euro profile is stored in Euro folder etc.
If you are interested in the charts set loaded in you terminal and their setting it's recommended to save those charts as a profile for your later loading and use.
To save a profile you have to go to File menu and select the Profiles sub-menu then press Save As command (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Profiles sub-menu
A little window (Figure 2) will be appear enabling you to enter the profile name or choose existing profile to replace it with the new settings.
Figure 2 - Profile name
Note: You can access all the commands of the Profiles menu from the Profile button on the Standard toolbar (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Let's take a practical example:
1- Load these three charts on an empty terminal window: EURUSD,M15 and EURUSD,H1 and EURUSD, Daily.
2- Load in the Daily chart the Moving Average indicator, in the H1 chart the MACD indicator and in the M15 chart the MACD Sample expert advisor. (Figure 4).
Figure 4
3- Now go to File menu and choose Profiles sub-menu then click Save As command.
4- Type Test as the name of the profile and click Ok button.
Now you have created the new Test profile with the three charts and their settings which you can load it at any time you want.
Note: After clicking Ok button a lot of things have been happened by the MetaTrader. The first thing MetaTrader has been done is creating a new folder called Test in the profiles path. Then he generated four files as the following:
1- chart01.chr <- this file is very like any template file (.tpl) and it contains the settings of the first chart.
2- chart02.chr <- the settings of the second chart.
3- chart03.chr <- the settings of the third chart.
4- order.wnd <- this file holding the order positions of each chart, which is the first chart, the second and third chart.
Loading a profile:
To load a profile you go to File menu and choose the Profiles sub-menu then click the name of the profile.
That will close the currently loaded profile and load the profile you have been chosen. The loaded profile will appear very like the last time you saved the profile with the same charts and their settings. If there are attached indicators and expert advisors they will be loaded as well with their settings and inputs.
Note: The loaded profile name will be appearing in the status bar (Figure 5) and its name will be checked in the Profiles sub-menu.
Figure 5
Navigation between saved profiles:
You can navigate (loading) between your saved profiles by going to Profiles sub-menu and choose Next and Previous commands.
You can also use F5 hotkey for Next navigation and SHIFT+F5 for Previous navigation.
Clicking Next will load the next profile of the current loaded profile and clicking Previous will load the previous profile of the currently loaded profile.
Removing a profile:
You can remove one of the already saved profiles by going to Profiles sub-menu and choose Remove sub-menu (Figure 6), you will find there all the saved profiles except two profiles:
Default profile: which you can remove it at all.
Current profile (test in our case): which you can't remove it because it's the currently loaded. To remove this profile you have to load another profile then delete it as described above.
