Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 11:37:01AM -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> One of the harder aspects to bonobo is that there haven't been many
> good examples of how to use some of these controls. I've seen a
> gnumeric bonobo for years, but have always scratched my head 
> "gee, now what? how do I use this thing?"
 

Unfortunately the answer has long been _zilch_

Ingoring i/o there were two interfaces of interest,

    Embeddable : A factory capable of generating views
    Control : A widget.

With gnome2 Embeddable went away which greatly decreased the already
sparse set of applications that supported it.  As far as I know
there was only ever
    - eog for images
    - guppi for charts

The former is handled more smoothly via gdkpixbuf directly, and the
latter was a huge irritation in comparison with the new shared
library support.

> p.s. speaking of gnumeric, is there a way of doing reports with
> gnumeric?  i.e. something similar to our discussion, an abi 
> document that reads "You owe us $fieldname dollars" where 
> $fieldname refers to some cell in a gnumeric spreadsheet? 
> I don't need this for gnucash, but was just curious if ti was
> supported and how it worked.

While I doubt this currently works, it was part of the original
CORBA interface.  Adding something like it again would not be hugely
difficult.  This was one of those areas where the ole/bonobo notion
of monikers worked nicely.  One could in essence write a moniker
    file/worksheetname/cellname

and have things magicly start gnumeric and use it to pull out the
content of that cell.  Of course it breaks down quickly in real
usage (eg did you want the value or the expression).  I'm not sure
such a generic interface is actually useful.  It always seems as if
one just ends up encoding an api in the string.

If someone really wants this sort of thing now I'd probably suggest
either doing a libgnumeric and using it (or one of its language
bindings) to load and extract.  Or alternatively, if the usecase was
well enough described we could do an abi-word style plugin command
and just suck things out manually.

Neither is terribly hard, but I generally avoid implementing things
until there is a clear reason to bother.