Re: GnuCash page on GO site

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 23:13 -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 10:13:17PM +1100, [email protected] was heard to remark:
> > >> > > 3/ reporting --
> > >> > Good idea.
> > >>
> > >> Note that reports mean different things to different people, and
> > >> that as a technology, its a *HUGE* bundle of requirements.
> > >
> > > Perhaps it is worth formally documenting them somewhere.  From your
> > > descriptions (template-editable-in-word-processor and
> > > database-fields-pulled-together) I don't see any reason it cannot be
> > > accomplished well.  I might even help code to such a project.
> > >
> > 
> > AbiWord certainly has the capability to do all this right now. 
> 
> I like that; one plan was to use the edit abilites in gtkhtml3 but
> that's not as nice as a "real" word processor, at least for printing.
> For reports that are meant to be web pages, then ... ?
> 
> > I can show
> > you how to construct documents that use libgda to pull in content from
> > whatever data source you want for programmable fields laid out in tables.
> 
> My gut feel is that libgda offers the wrong abstractions. 
> Although gnucash data can be (is) represented as SQL, that's 
> the wrong place to work. 
>
libgda supports SQL, oif course, but that's not the only way to access
data. An example:

	GdaDataModel *model;
	GdaCommand *cmd;

	cmd = gda_command_new ("table_name", GDA_COMMAND_TYPE_TABLE, 0);
	model = gda_connection_execute_single_command (cnc, cmd, NULL);

here, 'model' contains the contents of the 'table_name' table. As you
can see, no SQL at all.

There is also a way to modify the data, without any SQL at all, although
this needs still some support to be added for some providers (= database
plugins), which will be ready for libgda 1.2

I am starting to think that you are using the old libgda for GNOME 1.4,
is that the case?

>  There's a lot of pulling things together
> that must happen before the data is reportable.  For example,
> computing account balances can be quite complicated; its not a
> simple sql query or a simple table lookup.
> 
right, that's why libgda gives you some extra data management classes.
Specifically, there is GdaSelect, which gives you the ability to put
some data models (tables) together and do, without any client->server
interaction, SQL queries, even if the underlying database does not
support SQL.

> 
> Note, another requirement would be the ability to run the reports
> as a batch job, or as a cgi-bin. But this is for the future, no for 
> short term.  Something to think about.
> 
right, that's why there is the libgda / libgnomedb separation. libgda is
completely non-GUI, does not depend on any X / GTK /GNOME library and
thus can be used in command-line tools, cgi-bins, etc

cheers