Question

Answer

You have to do a little work to set things up, thereafter it can be a one keystroke operation to suspend all alarms or turn alarm monitoring back on again. Here's how:

Create a schedule that runs a scan. The scan will scan the .All Symbols quotepage, examining every instrument. The scan will turn OFF the alarm monitoring options for each instrument, putting them on hold, the alarm levels will still be in place, just the monitoring flags will be turned off.

The scan will use the token FLAG, the alarm flags for the instrument. There are constants in the RTL language for setting and unsetting various flags within the FLAG token. You can easily see a list of these constants by going to the scan setup window and choosing "Numeric Constants and Flags" from the "Show Tokens" menu.

SET(FLAG, -ALARM_GE); /* turn off hi alarm monitoring */

This RTL statement turns OFF (note minus sign) the alarm flag for monitoring for price levels greater than or equal (thus the name ..._GE) to the HIALARM value. SET(FLAG, ALARM_GE) will turn the flag ON and resume monitoring.

Similarly,

SET(FLAG, -ALARM_LE) turns off the LOALARM monitoring (LE stands for less than or equal).

Thus the scan you need to turn off both alarm level monitoring is simply:

SET(FLAG, -ALARM_GE) AND SET(FLAG, -ALARM_LE);  /* turn off hi and lo alarm monitoring */

In the Setup: Scan window, enter this formula and click Save to save it and give it a name. Then click the Setup button and create a schedule for this Scan. The schedule setup window will appear, assign a keyboard shortcut to schedule, say F2. Thus whenever you press F2 this schedule will run the can and put all alarms on hold. You may wish to add a Show Message action to your schedule after the Run Scan action. The Show Message action would display a message such as "All Alarm monitoring is OFF". The message will appear in the status message area of the main toolbar whenever you press F2 to run the scan.

You can do the same thing to create another shortcut, say F3, to turn alarm monitoring back on again. This second scan would have the same formula, without the minus signs, i.e.

SET(FLAG, ALARM_GE) AND SET(FLAG, ALARM_LE); /* turn alarm monitoring ON */

If you have HIALARM and LOALARM values setup for every ticker, this is the scan to use. If you wish to be more selective about the symbols for which you turn alarm monitoring back on, then you could setup this scan to run only on a particular quotepage rather than .All Symbols, perhaps the .Intraday quotepage for example. Or, you could do something like this:

IF (HIALARM > 0) THEN SET(FLAG, ALARM_GE)

Running this scan will turn on HIALARM monitoring for all symbols that have a HIALARM value above zero.

IF (LOALARM > 0) THEN SET(FLAG, ALARM_LE)

Running this scan will turn on low alarm monitoring selectively.

Since we have two scans here you will have to create a schedule (with shortcut F3) that first runs one, then the other scan, two "run scan" actions.

This answer illustrates how you can customize IRT to do things using scans, schedules, and keyboard shortcuts tailored to your needs. IRT does not need another menu command to suspend all alarms, you can add this functionality yourself in a minute or two using the tools at your disposal.