Transaction Search

[Derek Atkins]

"Colin Scott" <gnucash at double-bars.net> writes:

> Ummm - I wonder if we might explore that a little.
>
> When you say "this", are you referring to the overall concept that one
> should be able to search all text-based columns, or that the Number
> column should be included?

The former.  But it's not a question of whether one should be able to,
but the architecture of the search engine makes it really really REALLY
hard to do it.  Basiclly, internally you still need to enumerate all
the fields you want to search.  So, internally you would still need
to create a query that looks like:

  (NUM = "str") OR
  (Notes = "str") OR
  (Desc = "str") OR
  (Memo = "str") OR
  ...

> I hesitate to pick an argument (especially as I've not inspected the
> code!), but given that it is possible, though tedious, to do what I
> suggest by hand (by specifying a set of individual column searches),  how
> difficult can it be to create such a composite search with some form of
> "one touch" key?

Well, everything is just a SMOP.

The way the search dialog is currently written makes it pretty
hard to do this.  The creator of the dialog passes in a list of
QOF Param Lists for each search, and the dialog uses QOF to figure
out what type of parameter it is and adds it to the pulldown list.

I'm not sure what it would take to squeeze in a "list of lists"
into this architecture, but it's certainly not straightforward.

> Colin

-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