API on Windows

[John Ralls]

On Jul 31, 2012, at 5:27 AM, Ewan Slater <ewan.slater at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am running GnuCash 2.4.10 on Windows 7 (standard executable download).
> 
> I am interested in using the API (or at least trying to).
> 
> Do I have to build GnuCash from source to be able to access the API, or are
> the libraries available pre - compiled for Windows (ideally shipped with
> the binaries)?
> 
> Looking here http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/C_API seems to imply I need to
> build from source.
> 
> I don't want to make any mods to GnuCash itself at this point, I'd just
> like to be able to call the API from a Windows program written in C++
> (currently using MS Visual Studio Express 2008 / Visual C++).  So if I can
> avoid building the whole thing from scratch I would prefer not to.
> 

The libraries are of course in the downloaded package -- it wouldn't work otherwise. They're in the same directory as gnucash itself. What's not there is the headers, so you'll need to get the sources and either use them from there or extract the headers to somewhere convenient.

Note, however, that Gnuacsh is built with gcc in a MinGW/MSYS environment. No effort has been made to get them to work with MSVC, so you're on your own for that part. Good Luck. 

Regards,
John Ralls