Re: Making the expense conduit work with gnucash.

[Robert Graham Merkel <rgmerk mira net>]

Carlos Morgado writes:
 > On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 12:41:02PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
 > > 
 > > 
 > > I'm helping to develop gnucash (http://gnucash.org), a personal
 > > finance manager in the spirit of Quicken.  I'm trying to add 
 > > support for importing expenses from the Palm expense tracker into 
 > > Gnucash.  
 > > 
 > This has been talked about on the list before. (ie, you may want to look at
 > the archives if you're new :))
 > 
Thanks for this.
 > I'd favour a scheme like the one used by memo_file. Deleting stuff from 
 > the pilot is bad for the people who sync at 2 or more locations
 > 
I'll have a look at this.  Thanks for the pointer.

 > > Unfortunately, such an operation would break the semantics of the 
 > > conduit methods (it is neither a copy nor a merge).  Can the design of
 > > gnome-pilot cope with this admittedly slightly unusual operation?
 > 
 > IIRC expense records on the pilot carry IDs so it's trivial.
Excellent.  How unique are they guaranteed to be?

 > Does Gnumeric have a corba interface ? 
Not at this stage.  I believe the lead developers have considered it,
but it's not a near-term priority.  We already have several methods
of providing exensibility and scriptability (Perl and Scheme
interfaces, as well as making the engine a library).

How do you propose records get passed
 > from the conduit to gnucash ?
We discussed this on the gnucash list.  We came up with the following:
Conduit writes to "foo.lnk" file in trivial-to-parse format.
Gnucash, when "foo.xac" is
loaded, parses foo.lnk and adds the transactions (modulo a bit of file
locking etc). 
Alternatively, the gnucash engine is available as a library, so the
conduit can make direct calls to the engine if need be.
Not as elegant as CORBA, perhaps, but both methods will work.

 > Have you considered other pilot money tracking stuff ? 
 > I use PocketMoney at the pilot. pocket$ <-> gnucash would have to sync 
 > both ways, ie keep both dbs similar. does gnucash have support for this kind
 > of thing ?
Not at the moment, but there's no reason why such support couldn't be
added without too much difficulty.  However, for me, I couldn't see
why such a system would be necessary.  I don't want to analyse my
financial data on my pilot - I don't even want it permanently stored
on my pilot.  All I want to be able to do is record expenses as they
occur, then import them into gnucash where I can analyse them to my
heart's content.  So, in summary, there's no reason why it couldn't,
but I personally don't have any incentive to write a conduit for
PocketMoney or another system, as the expense tracker and simple
importation would meet my needs.

Thanks for your assistance, and I hope I can start contributing
something concrete in the near future.

-- 
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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give
names to constants; instead of referring to pi as
3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can
be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead
of the longer form of the constant.  This also simplifies
modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
                -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
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