Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 10:13:17PM +1100, msevior physics unimelb edu au 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.  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.

I started work on "qof" (qof.sourceforge.net) to deal with this.
I did not get any buy-in from the gda folks on this, though.

> Doing this in AbiWord has the extra benefit that users can fiddle with it
> afterward, export them to lots of different formats, cut and paste them
> into other documents, etc etc.

Yes, that is exactly what is wanted.  

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.

> I actually have a much smaller requirement for my own home-grown little
> accounts/budgeting program. I'll use AbiWord to show how far each budget
> catergory is ahead or behind it's projected value.

One project I'd like to see happen someday is a 'gnucash-simple'
which would just go back to a very very very simple UI. 
But that's another day.

--linas

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