Hi ... proposal for Bug #336843

[Mohammad Keshmiri]

Hi Everyone,

My name is Mohammad and I am currently doing my masters in computing at 
the Australian National University.
As part of a course on FOSS development (taught by Dr Andrew Tridgell 
and Bob Edwards) we are required to involve and contribute to a FOSS 
project of our choice. For anyone interested, the course materials and 
lecture recordings would also be available on a free license from: 
http://cs.anu.edu.au/student/comp8440/

One feature that I would like to see in GnuCash and it seems to have 
been in demand since 2006 is the ability to attach documents to 
transactions. (Bug # 336843)
I was wondering if anyone is working on this at the moment and if not, I 
would be glad to have a go at implementing this feature. Looking at the 
mailing list archives, I think Ryan has been the last person to 
volunteer to do this but with no further discussion on bugzilla, I 
assume this has not been started yet. I will put a link to this email on 
bugzilla so that the discussion could be done in one place.

So far, I can think of at least 3 different approaches:

1) Putting the attachments as blobs in a table: This makes everything to 
be in one file and makes backing up data files quite straight forward 
but has the problem of potentially resulting a huge data file and also 
data duplication as many people might already have a structure for 
storing those documents separately.

2) Storing links to the documents: This seems to be the easiest 
solution, but if the files are moved to a different location all 
relevant records needs to be updated. Also, potentially this would break 
the portability of the files between windows and unix-like file systems.

3) Relative Addressing: just like option 2, but all the files are 
addressed relative to a base address. This makes updating the links much 
easier as usually only the base address needs to be changed.

Ideally, we should allow users to select/change the method themselves 
but for now I think having either of them would be a step forward. Also, 
for simplicity I am thinking of limiting the number of attachments for 
each transaction to one.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Cheers,
Mohammad