Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

> > > 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.

> No problem either. AbiWord has a command-line interface and be run as a
> document server. I wrote a nice little bit of code that can shows how
> this works. See attachments.

Not to pooh-pooh the idea, but gnucash-1.0 back in 1998 was a 
micro-web server, you could point your web browser at it and 
pick one of several reports, and it would show you your bank 
balances in html. You could save the html to a file or print 
if you wanted.  In the end, it turns out it was a cheap stunt 
that no one cared about.  I think that this is because that
is not the way people thought an app should work, and the 
rest of the desktop infrastructure, the other office apps,
weren't prepared to share data by intereacting with a micro-web 
server. 

Far more interesting is the idea that one could click-drag 
a gnucash report to abiword, and incorporate it into a document,
or vice-versa, click-drag the report into abiword, and thus
edit the raw template that defines the visual layout of the 
report.  

--linas


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