Bulk transaction mover (was: question about importing .qif files)

[Bill Gribble]

Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@hex.net> writes:
> It sounds like the world "needs" some form of "transaction filter."

Yes.  

> That is, a mechanism whereby you walk through a set of transactions,
> with a function that evaluates the contents of each transaction,
> transforming it into another transaction as needed.

Maybe.  The Query API was designed to do exactly the first part of
this problem: walk over the transactions, using the most efficient
means available given the backend, and select a set of transactions
based on a (possibly quite complex) criterion.  

I think the Right Way to solve this problem is to use the Query API to
select a set of transactions, *then* apply the transformation to all
splits in the set.  

The wrong way to do this is to build a transformation system that
depends on manually examining every split.  We really want to make
this scalable to a multiuser (i.e. SQL backend) scenario where
possible; the Query API will let you do that, but if you explicitly
start iterating over all splits in your user code you will be cooked
on an SQL backend.

b.g.