questions about plugging a palm conduit into Gnucash

[Derek Atkins]

Philip Lowman <philip at yhbt.com> writes:

> Over the last several months I've become something of a devoted
> Gnucash user so much so that I'm tracking cash expenditures including
> Sales Tax these days[!].
>
> Anyways, I am getting sick of asking for a receipt for every cash
> purchase I make and I'd like to write a palm application which allows
> me to enter new transactions into an Account which are then
> synchronized with Gnucash when I Hotsync.  I'm fairly certain I can
> write the Palm app to facilitate this however I'm not too certain
> about the glue between Gnucash and the Palm databases.

The concept has been discussed before.

> I have investigated OFX and rejected the idea of constructing OFX from
> the handheld data because it doesn't handle splits (which I would like
> to support in the application).  

Have you considered QIF instead of OFX?  QIF does support splits and
is IMHO a simpler format than OFX.

>      I am just wondering if Gnucash has
> any kind of consistent plugin interface which will never change?  I am
> considering interfacing with the core gnucash libraries by writing my
> own code which calls the Gnucash libraries to add transactions and so
> forth since it seems the easiest way to do this.  I guess I'm just
> worried about having to make changes and recompile my app when things
> are changed in Gnucash itself between releases.

The plugin interface per se is fairly small, but as with any project
there is no guarantee that it will never change.  Similarly, there is
no guarantee that the GnuCash API will never change.

> Also some pointers would be helpful.  Essentially I want my conduit to
> open a gnucash file and simply add transactions and splits to it and
> close the file.  Are there any problems or pitfalls that anyone can
> think of in doing this?

Keep in mind that right now only one app can have a datafile open.
That means you'd have to make sure gnucash is NOT running when you run
your conduit, otherwise the conduit wouldn't be able to open the
database.

I'd search back in the archives (a year or so) to try to find previous
discussions of this topic.  We certainly welcome the functionality.

> Philip Lowman

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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