example library calls

[John Ralls]

On Mar 24, 2012, at 5:34 PM, Danny Holstein wrote:

> Developers; 
> 
> I can't seem to find an example of how to call the Gnucash libraries. I'd like to write a program that posts invoices from a web-based shopping cart, and I can imagine a POS program or ERP program using the library for the GL backend. 
> 
> I would expect examples to be in a top level examples directory, with language-based subdirectories such as C and python. 
> 
> I had tried a search of the archive, but the search seemed broken and yielded no results. 
> 

The examples are found throughout the codebase. ;-)  You seem to be suffering from the delusion that we're publishing a library for external programs to use. That is not the case. We publish a program which is broken up into libraries for our convenience. The API is more-or-less documented [1], but is in no way guaranteed to be stable. In fact its present form is a huge aromatic pile and is guaranteed *not* to be stable, because I intend to rewrite it in a more consistent form over the next several years.

Now, if you can live with that, go right ahead and use it. It's open source, so you can even fork it and do what you will, just like our predecessors did with QOF. Just don't expect us to support your users or to constrain our future development (even to the point of deprecating instead of removing functions or even whole classes) on your behalf.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] http://svn.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/