Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[Martin Sevior <msevior seviorpc ph unimelb edu au>]

On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 02:57, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 01:43:18AM +1100, msevior physics unimelb edu au was heard to remark:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Yes,... 
> I was thinking of a relationship similar to that between glade
> and libglade.  In this analogy, abiword is like glade.  
> 
> glade                               abiword
> -----                               ========
> The GUI designer uses              The form designer uses
> glade to design a gui.             abiword to create a form.
> 
> His GUI has a text box             She uses abiword to create
> widget, and the name of            a dunning letter. "Dear sir,
> that text box is "total"           you owe us (_total_) dollars.
>                                    Sincerely, William Sue,esq."
> 
> C Programmer uses libglade          C programmer does ???
> to access the GUI. Programmer       to push a value into 
> does a GtkTextView *txt_w =         (_total_).
> glade_xml_get_widget("total");
> then does
> gtk_textview_set_text(txt_w,
> "$123.45"); 
> to insert text into that widget.
> 
> Programmer does                    Programmer does ???
> gtk_widget_show(txt_w);            to cause the resulting 
> to make the GUI visible.           form letter to display/print.
> 
> 
> The above is a "push" model where gnucash pushes data into
> the form. 
> 

I agree it's much easier to do this. We can certainly put hooks into
AbiWord for this. There are many ways to set up the communication
between GNUcash and AbiWord. Do you have a particular idea in mind? 

> I suppose we could do a pull rather than a push, put pulls
> are technically a whole lot harder, orders of magnitude harder,
> because then we get into the whole question of what's dwi, 
> whats qof, what's libgda do.
> 
> > Yes. It occured to me you could re-use the your existing code that
> > generates HTML. 
> 
> yes, well that existing code is the existing gnucash "reporting 
> engine" and its not extensible, its hard to create new reports, 
> its slow, the visual layout is lacking, there's no wysiwyg 
> designer etc.  Which is why we are having this conversation :-).
> 

No worries :-)

Martin

> --linas
>