Rounding in the price db.

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 12, 2015, at 4:18 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> John,
> 
> One other common use case for the Price DB is to track a stock’s value over time. In that circumstance, multiple price DB values (presumably no more than one per day) would be used. Many users want this functionality, as evidenced by the requests over the years to have mechanisms to provide historical quotes or automatic retrieval, etc. These are driven (I believe) by the desire to see how a commodity is or has performed over time. 
> 
> And while it takes this discussion on a different trajectory, I think it is nonetheless germane to note that how GnuCash uses and stores commodity values doesn’t match the expectations of many users. Users are confused by the Price In Transaction vs. Price in PriceDB distinction (I know I am, and I suspect I am exhibiting it here!). 
> 
> Since you are discussing fundamental issues with the PriceDB, I’ll take the liberty of saying that I would love to have more PriceDB functionality—for example, to be able to have bulk methods for adding or pruning prices at set intervals (such as weekly or monthly); to optionally omit commodities with zero balance holdings; to automatically skip over erroneous quotes and report on problems after the fact. I am sure others have ideas as well. 

David,

Yup, that other use is included in “calculating values in reports”. No one’s suggesting anything that would break the net worth graphs.

I know about and understand the confusion about the difference between price in a split (it’s amount/value, where amount is the quantity of this account’s commodity and value what that amount is worth in the other account’s commodity) and the price stored in the price db, which might be the same if it’s recorded from a transaction but can also be from a manual entry in the price editor or a downloaded price from Finance::Quote. Do you have any suggestions to make the distinction easier to understand?

As for enhancements to online quote retrieval, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon unless someone steps up to do it. 

Regards,
John Ralls