Vanishing transactions and log file

[Donald Allen]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> writes:
>
>  [snip]
>  > Practical Questions:
>  > 1. Is there a guide to the format of the .log files somewhere?
>
>  In the sources.
>
>  > 2. Is there some way I could cut out pieces of them (e.g., the lines
>  > starting with B), put them in a file, and replay them to get them back?
>
>  Ummm.. I wouldn't.  It would be easier and faster to just re-enter
>  the transactions by hand.
>
>  > Less Practical Questions:
>  > 3. Can anyone think of any way the stock transactions would be deleted
>  > without my manual intervention?
>
>  Nope.  It sounds like you saw them in another account, didn't realize
>  what they were for, and deleted them there.  The only potential way
>  gnucash would have self-destructed is if the transactions had the same
>  GUIDs.
>
>  > 4. Why is gnucash constantly retitling my splits, moving them around
>  > vertically, and creating new splits?  I'm sure I had this problem with
>  > the stock sales, and it may have been the same issue with the regular
>  > transactions that misbehaved.
>
>  It all depends on how you enter them.  If you hit 'enter' then it
>  causes the transaction to get partially committed, and scrubbed,
>  and that will cause splits to get re-ordered.  Arguable this is a
>  bug.
>
>  >               I suspect two problems.  First, with
>  > autosplit, if you enter 2 splits that use the same account as the
>  > register window you are in, the interface moves these around so that
>  > they appear visually as 2 separate transactions.
>
>  This isn't a bug.  Arguably it's a feature.  The best way to
>  explain this is that an account register doesn't show transactions,
>  it shows splits.  Now, GENERALLY you only have one split in
>  an account, so the "transaction" appears only once.  But in the
>  case of a stock sale with cap-gains, yes, you see it twice.
>  There IS an open RFE for an option to "combine" multiple splits
>  from one transaction into a single line in the register, but I
>  suspect that wont happen anytime soon.

The thing that is confusing is that when a register is viewed in
anything other than 'transaction journal' mode, something that was
entered as one transaction shows up as two entries. You say that the
register shows splits, but I don't completely buy that. There
per-transaction fields, e.g.,  'description'  and 'date'. These show
up twice in the 'Basic Ledger' and 'Auto-split Ledger' modes for
transactions like this where the account appears twice in a
transaction. But then they show up once when using the 'transaction
journal' mode.
So it's not hard to understand why someone would be confused. I was,
too, when I first ran into this.

Having said all that, I don't think I can make a case that what
gnucash is doing is unreasonable. The two ledger modes are trying to
collapse transactions and not show you the details of all the splits.
So separating the two sets of splits into separate (displayed)
transactions gives you more information than if it just showed you a
single transaction line. If you want to see how it really was entered,
the transaction journal mode does that for you, at the expense of
vertical screen space.

Ross -- I think this is a matter of getting used to how gnucash works.
It's different in many ways than the commercial offerings, but in a
lot of instances, and I think this is one of them, once you get used
to it, you find that it's quite reasonable and much more informative
and consistent than the lowest-common-denominator stuff that Intuit
and Microsoft would feed you, to mix my metaphors.

/Don


>
>  >         Second, the register
>  > seems to insist that certain accounts appear as the first or last split.
>
>  It does order credits and debits.  It shouldn't care about the
>  accounts.
>
>  > I'm now on 2.2.4; I think it was 2.2.3 at the time of the
>  > disappearances.
>
>  I dont think anything changed in the register code there.
>
>  > Thanks.
>  > Ross
>
>  > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>  > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
>  -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
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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