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Navigating Blueshift®

Workspace on Blueshift®

Once you land on Blueshift®, you usually arrive at the main strategy page, that looks like below

strategy

This is the top level (root) of your workspace on Blueshift. The blue buttons on the top right create folder and create folder respectively creates a new directory or a new source file at the current location. You can create a directory under another directory which is not root as well. This tree-like directory structure helps us in two ways:

  • Keep all our source codes and strategies organized. You can keep related strategies in a single directory.
  • Helps us create custom packages so that we can re-use our codes.

The first point is obvious. The second may need some elaboration.

Creating custom package and re-using codes

Once you create a directory, we automatically add a blank __init__.py in it. This makes it behave like a regular package. You can import source files in it (or import objects like functions or classes in that files) just like a standard Python module into any other source file in any other directory. To do this, always use the absolute path method of import. This starts from top level directory name. Suppose in the above figure, we have a source file named indicators under a directory called technicals in the top level directory named library. If the indicator source file defines a function called bollinger_band, we can use this function in another strategy, anywhere in our workspace, simply by importing it in the following way.

from blueshift_library.technicals.indicators import bollinger_band

Using the code editor

Clicking on any directory on the strategy list takes you inside that directory. Clicking on any source file takes you to the code editor. The present code editor is based on Monaco that powers VS Code. If you are familiar with the VS Code, most of the short-cuts will work. At present, missing features are automatic code suggestion and a built-in debugger.

Error and output windows

On the bottom right beside the code editor, you have the error and output window. If you use any print in your code, the output will be delivered in this window (tab named Logs)1. The error windows will show message or errors from the core engine or from the underlying Python environment. In case of errors, this will automatically expand and will have an additional button report issuer

  1. We truncate the output to terminal (output of the print calls) in case it is too large - showing values from the top and bottom, skipping the middle section. ↩