automatic progressive transaction id across accounts

[Havard Rast Blok]

Hi again,

Although I'm not 100% about Paolo's usage, I can imagine that a 32 byte 
"random" string is not quite what he had in mind.

For my own business accounting, every single transaction has to be 
backed by a physical receipt. To easily search and identify the pile of 
papers which quickly accumulate, each receipt is numbered, from 1 and 
up. The link between the papers and the accounting system is this 
number. In other systems, this number is auto-incremented for each new 
transaction.

 From my point of view, the requirements for this ID would be:
- Auto-increment for each new transaction.
- IDs of previously typed transactions should not be altered.
- +1 increment should continue even if a new transaction is back-dated 
to a date before a transaction with a lower ID.
- There should be a user defined starting ID.
- Padded zero's should be respected, e.g. 0001, or 09001.
- Based on what Paolo mentioned, there might also be a requirement to 
define a more complex ID, i.e. based on country, department, etc: 
UK-HR-2009-0001.

Regards,
Havard


Yawar Amin wrote:
> Hi Paolo,
> 
> I can confirm that every transaction in Gnucash has a unique ID. In fact
> most entities inside a Gnucash file--accounts, transactions, splits,
> currencies--have unique IDs. These are 32-character GUIDs, or globally
> unique identifiers, where each character is a digit in the hexadecimal
> radix. In short, you're pretty much guaranteed that every transaction in
> every Gnucash file in the world has a unique ID. However, I don't think
> these IDs are incremented one by one when new transactions are added. So you
> can't do certain things, like calculate how many transactions there are
> between any two given transactions.
> 
> Having said that, I think the transaction GUID should satisfy your admin
> dept. Of course, these IDs aren't visible in the Gnucash user interface.
> You'll need to open up the XML file to examine them, or have a
> program/script written which does that.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Yawar
> 
> On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:00 AM, paolo palmerini <paolo at palmerini.org>wrote:
> 
>> dear all,
>> i am a new gnucash user and i am trying to promote the wide scale
>> adoption of gnucash within my NGO,  working in about 10 different
>> countries with different languages and currencies. gnucash seems to be
>> the right software to manage our accounts but still there are a couple
>> of issues that limit its unconditional adoption.
>>
>> the first and most important requirement coming from my organisation
>> admin department is the possibility of automatic numbering of
>> transactions across different accounts within the same gnucash file.
>>
>> from what i understand, at present gnucash provides a "num" field for
>> each transaction that can be manually filled by the user and can
>> be automatically incremented within the same account typing the
>> "+" key on it. however, the system does not prevent from assigning twice
>> the same number to different transactions within the same account or
>> across different accounts.
>>
>> my question is: is there a simple way to achieve this automatic
>> progressive numbering (with the possibility of resetting the numbering
>> every year?). if not, where in the code would one have to put his/her
>> hands to add this feature?
>>
>> last question: am i the only one with such requirement? is there another
>> way to get a unique transaction id?
>>
>> thanks for any help,
>> p.
>>
>> --
>> me, myself... [http://www.palmerini.org]
>> ...and my podcast
>> [http://www.palmerini.org/podkasbaht]
>>
>>
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