The Gnucash database?

[Neil Williams]

On Saturday 24 July 2004 4:33, Mark H. Wood wrote:

Sorry to cut you short, Mark, but:

> I get the feeling that some people are reading "flat file" to mean
> arbitrary text such as the U.N. Charter or an advertisement for shirts.
> Typically that's not at all what it means; for automatic data processing
> purposes a "flat file" is rigidly structured and has a precise meaning
> amenable to calculation -- it's what ADP used for everything, before
> there were DBMSs.

i.e. QIF or OCX. Both are rigidly structured text files with precise meanings 
and only ASCII characters. This has been discussed before, there seems to be 
no reason for "blfs" (who still hasn't given a real name) to look for another 
format - structured text files already exist for import into GnuCash. QIF 
(and IIRC OCX) were specifically designed for ADP with financial data.

This is the problem, the terms are vague and everyone seems to read flat-file 
as meaning something different. For the purposes of GnuCash, "flat file" MUST 
mean either QIF or OCX. Nothing else is sufficiently structured for financial 
data (or we'd be using it!)

(XML comes in there somewhere too.)

If someone creates a new format, they are responsible for creating the 
filter/import routine to make that new format readable by GnuCash. As it is, 
formats already exist AND are in use.

So, to restate the question for "blfs" , again:

What is wrong with QIF or OCX?

-- 

Neil Williams
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