Re: GnuCash page on GO site

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 01:44 -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> > > > 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.  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.
> > > 
> > 
> > This is not insurmountable. We can use our mail-merge fields or even
> > invent some new ones for gnuCash
> 
> ?
> To run a report, one typically has to walk a tree of accounts, 
> look at a set of transactions between pairs of accounts, between
> a certain set of dates, and then check certain flags on these
> transactions, such as 'cleared' or 'reconciled', possibly add or
> not add them together based on that state or some other criteria,
> such as the payee name, and possibly do some currency conversions.  
> Its not exactly simple.
> 
> I think I know of a good way to implement this, but its more
> than a few weeks or even a few months of coding.
> 
I also know of a way to write this, which is to write a libgda provider
for GnuCash. Thus, when you return data to clients, you can do whatever
calculations you want to do.

cheers