Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[<msevior physics unimelb edu au>]

>> > > 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 wasn't suggesting this code be in AbiWord. I was meant that we could
invent some fields that could be filled *explicitly* by GNUcash. AbiWord
would call out to the external GNUcash program via a plugin to extract the
values of the fields.

>> 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.
>

Sorry I was replying to the point you made about wanting to hang a report
generating tool off an apache module. My point is that is it is possible
to  run AbiWord in server mode and get it to do useful things. Like
generating reports.

> 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.
>

Yes. It occured to me you could re-use the your existing code that
generates HTML. If AbiWord can't handle the import of your GNUCash
generated HTML we will fix it until it does.

For click drag, you could either export (X)HTML to the clipboard and paste
it into AbiWord or we could define a some new drop targets in AbiWord to
paste (X)HTML documents dragged and dropped into a document.

Both these should be done in the AbiWord-2.2 time-frame (2-4 months I guess).

Martin