Change Ninjatrader Folder Location

[Brockjava]

Hello Team,

I have been closely following the community discussions and it's evident that many of us are grappling with some challenges related to OneDrive integration. With decades of experience in the IT field, I've come to realize that the essence of IT isn't just technological prowess but also customer service.

It's noteworthy that, like many organizations, we are mandated to use OneDrive. Given its ubiquity and the slim chance of Microsoft changing its deeply integrated functionalities in the OS, it's crucial for us to adapt, particularly for our Windows user base who have no option but to use OneDrive.

May I suggest that NinjaTrader's development team consider creating a more seamless interface with OneDrive? By doing so, you would not only be resolving a frequent point of friction but also enhancing customer satisfaction. It's a concern when users have to contemplate switching to competitors like Quantower solely due to installation limitations.

Sync errors are a red flag in the IT world; let's work together to ensure that NinjaTrader is not a contributing factor to these concerns.

Thank you for considering this. We're all here because we appreciate what NinjaTrader offers, and I'm optimistic that a solution is within reach.

Best regards,

Brockjava

[QuantKey_Bruce]

It's the same song again, new verse.

https://forum.ninjatrader.com/forum/suggestions-and-feedback/suggestions-and-feedback-aa/1243575-detect-onedrive

[carnitron]

I suspect the support team has heard the community's concerns loud and clear and probably even quietly agrees.

But they must toe the party line, so to speak, which is why we keep going round and around.

I suspect their is either a communication failure higher up the food chain or they have the bulk of their engineering staff on NT9 or some higher priority.

That said, there are enough improvements with each NT8 point revision that it seems like there should be room the slot SOME kind of fix or mitigation for something that is clearly so destructive to the new user experience. Wrestling with the problems this created for me probably cost me 15 hours or so, and I've been a software engineer or a long time. I can't imagine how perplexing/frustrating it would be for a newer person.

This lack of acknowledgement/acceptance and any kind of a plan to fix the issue is concerning, of course, which is a bummer. Even messaging like "we've heard you and are discussing options" would be helpful.

Brockjava Have you used Quantower? Bard tells me it supports C# 8.0 and above; being stuck on C# 5 in NT8 in 2023 is another sore spot for me. I have moved most of my trading engine out to a DLL on C# 7.3, and I have plans to investigate being able to bridge between different assembly versions, so I can move it to C# 11. But if Quantower kicks ass and uses a more modern version of C#, then that would be worth knowing.

Cheers

[jeronymite]

carnitron Your generous assessment of the state of the organisation is commendable, but experience shows that NinjaTrader Management is firmly committed to its own "vision" in which the Desktop platform is an historical appendage to be kept alive until the revenue of the "all Futures" approach is so profitably locked-in and the Desktop so archaic that all versions of the Desktop are put into maintenance mode only.

It would be like NinjaTrader 7 for all versions. There would be minimal expenditure required at that point, and the push to have people move to the new-fangled platforms released in March this year would begin in earnest. All NinjaTrader protestations to the contrary and any "assurances" are utterly meaningless without major material changes to the Desktop application to bring it from a somewhat flawed early 21st century implementation into the mid-21st century! If it happens, all credit to the decision-makers ... but history and existing management attitudes argue strongly against it.

Thanks.

[carnitron]

jeronymite Which new-fangled platform are you referring to? Are you suggesting they are moving to a futures focus that is basically client user experience only? I.e. you just use the client to manually trade futures instead of writing code to trade against the markets, as we do now with NT8 on the desktop?

And then we are in maintenance mode only on the desktop in perpetuity?

If true, that would suck. I don't need yet another trading client, I need what NT8 provides from a development perspective. For the most part, it's an amazing platform that has enabled me to gather all sorts of insights as I push towards getting into solid green with some of my strategies.

But it would make sense that we're getting the run around on several issues if they are moving away from pushing forward on the desktop. Have they made statements to that effect anywhere that I can look at?

[jeronymite]

carnitron It's my opinion based on the state of the Desktop platform and the large array of things that are simply ignored or made so difficult to pursue that one simply gives up, which, dare I say it, is a deliberate strategy and argues in favour of what I have said.

Then there's the major actions of March this year, with the prioritisation of the Tradovate and mobile platforms, all targeted at Futures, as is also the huge bias towards Futures in the newly-introduced online User Accounts portal.

It seems there are generally reductions in support and development for anything except Futures (Forex is essentially becoming a deprecated thing), including shrinking selections of brokers. Add to that the interactions one sees in the forum and my own contact with various NinjaTrader staff, mainly from Support, but not entirely so; and factor in the appalling neglect of the Desktop platform for many many years such that its embedded third-party elements are often obsolete and even completely unsupported by the original producers, and the pattern is clear enough.

The platform as-is would still be very capable of being developed by people like us, but it would become less and less maintainable if the neglect became officially "maintenance only". That's the direction all the lack of action on the platform and the emphasis of action in other areas speak to. And let's face it, as others have said, a brokerage bonanza is most likely driving many strategic decisions, and platforms that are high maintenance and don't heavily weigh into that brokerage-based perspective are probably unlikely to prosper.

It will take a massively disruptive change of management approach to convince many long-term, loyal and knowledgeable customers in this forum that there is anything seriously intended for the Desktop. I hope it happens, but as I said, history argues against it.

Thanks.

[carnitron]

Ugh. Ok thank you kindly for clarifying. I see where you are coming from. I suppose we can hope that futures focus will arrive at its destination at some point, and then they can return to other parts of their product suite, but... hope is not a strategy, obvs.

I can make due with what we have for now, b/c I need to focus on revenue generation for now, but if it really is going to be a permanent maintenance mode kind of thing, then it would obviously be prudent to check into other vendors' offerings at some point.

Would it be fair to say that they see futures as more profit and less work and the desktop development environment as lots of work and less profit? I can see how that would make sense from a business perspective, though I wonder how much they stand out against competitors, w/out the development platform aspect.

Cheers.

[brenthilburn]

carnitron It's my opinion based on the state of the Desktop platform and the large array of things that are simply ignored or made so difficult to pursue that one simply gives up, which, dare I say it, is a deliberate strategy and argues in favour of what I have said.

Then there's the major actions of March this year, with the prioritisation of the Tradovate and mobile platforms, all targeted at Futures, as is also the huge bias towards Futures in the newly-introduced online User Accounts portal.

It seems there are generally reductions in support and development for anything except Futures (Forex is essentially becoming a deprecated thing), including shrinking selections of brokers. Add to that the interactions one sees in the forum and my own contact with various NinjaTrader staff, mainly from Support, but not entirely so; and factor in the appalling neglect of the Desktop platform for many many years such that its embedded third-party elements are often obsolete and even completely unsupported by the original producers, and the pattern is clear enough.

The platform as-is would still be very capable of being developed by people like us, but it would become less and less maintainable if the neglect became officially "maintenance only". That's the direction all the lack of action on the platform and the emphasis of action in other areas speak to. And let's face it, as others have said, a brokerage bonanza is most likely driving many strategic decisions, and platforms that are high maintenance and don't heavily weigh into that brokerage-based perspective are probably unlikely to prosper.

It will take a massively disruptive change of management approach to convince many long-term, loyal and knowledgeable customers in this forum that there is anything seriously intended for the Desktop. I hope it happens, but as I said, history argues against it.

Thanks.

Spot on... anyone paying CLOSE attention can see the writing on the wall... the only thing slowing/stopping this is the lack of support for the "Web" version (Tradeovate) from the 3rd party vendors... But some of them will capitulate and start to develop out of a sense of self-survival... I will say it because some wont... Trading from your iPad over the web means you treat trading like a hobby and not a profession.. No self-respecting trader is going to put their live cash account at the mercy of a web app... Sorry not sorry...

Ninjatrader is hoping to become the Robinhood of the futures market... plain and simple... And by the time that happens, serious traders will have adapted and moved on... There are SO MANY 3rd party vendors who are already developing for other platforms... not Tradeovate... Other platforms entirely... The FU to Ninjatrader is going to be a huge wakeup call when it happens...

[fastfire]

Just to Add Must have custom NinjaTrader 8 App User data. This is pretty standard, and unacceptable that You cannot specify your user folder location. Windows 11 defaults this, and you cannot exclude this. Please add custom location to store user data, you already have Registry entry for User Doc folder, but the program does not use this in all code references.

[haakonflaar]

Please allocate some resources to fix this...

[QuantKey_Bruce]

The fact that NinjaTrader made a decision around twenty years ago to store transitory data like incoming ticks to the 'db' folder in Documents -> NinjaTrader 8 is a technical debt. It will eventually become necessary for NinjaTrader to default the storage location for such data to another location that is not in the Documents folder such as the user data folder or some other suitable place as of 2023. So far, though, NinjaTrader is a bit in denial that this is a problem, saying things like "the documents folder is a perfectly good location as long as another program does not interfere" (even though Windows installs OneDrive backing up the Documents folder by default now - so, NinjaTrader is broken by default on all new Windows installations.) Hopefully, they will fix this. It is clearly wrong and saying it isn't wrong or blaming OneDrive when OneDrive is installed and backing up Documents by default doesn't change this.

Even if NinjaTrader provided an easy option to relocate the folder elsewhere, to default it to Documents in 2023 is just wrong. The decision wasn't particularly wrong when it was made, but it is wrong now, because times have changed. In 2023, Windows defaults to backing up the Documents folder with OneDrive, and accepting this new reality, if one bravely does accept reality, means acknowledging that the 'db' folder at least is being stored in the wrong place now. The alternative is to blame others and pretend this isn't happening, and expect EVERY new NinjaTrader installation on a new Windows to have to go through special steps just to get normal functioning.

[G-Steward]

I've enjoyed reading these posts, especially from the technologically experienced among us, whose posts I have to believe have made it up the chain beyond the initial NT support personnel, who may (perhaps not admittedly) lack the specialized experience of those they are supporting, i.e., the customers in this forum. This issue, and this thread specifically, has gone on for years. I am only a year with NT so please forgive the ignorance of what may be a stupidly simple workaround that I haven't seen mentioned but was likely already considered... MS OD has, within its settings, the ability to exclude files by their extension. If one was to exclude the .txt files (and others found within the NT subfolders) this could help but this would obviously impact non-NT files using any common extensions that you want backed up/synced found elsewhere in your Documents folder.

In any case, please count my vote for "what they said."

[payter]

Hi, i had all configs shared between 2 PC's by OneDrive but when I run it from another PC then it ruined the whole folder and it was unusable it corrupted those files so I needed to delete it and reinstall it from zero. When I uninstalled and installed NinjaTrader again, then suddenly all files were in `c:\Users\%user%\` and not in OneDrive why is that? Im not complaining, I want it that way, I just want to make it the same on a second PC.

[tullips]

It is a never ending story, but the best thing to do is to set onedrive to NOT connect again, and use Gdrive to do the same for folders you care about. Why OneDrive this still is doing is a real mystery to me, Google knows what people want, Microsoft guess what people want....