Format implementations

[Bill Gribble]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 02:00:03PM +0100, Bruin, Bolke de wrote:
> I am not totally confident that what I am going to write applies to
> gnucash as I am not *really* familiar with the program.  (no flames
> please, I will have a better look into it) Currently I am working
> for a company which delivers stockquotes to third-parties. Part of
> this is a Quicken-server implementation.  You might have seen
> "Quicken OFX server" passing along somewhere (freshmeat), I wrote
> this server.

I think that you have been sent to gnucash-devel as an early Christmas
gift :) We have been looking for someone with OFX experience for a
long time, but haven't found anyone.  I hope you will have some time
to contribute your experience and code to gnucash.

> I would like to know if there is a kind of plug-in system for
> importing formats into gnucash. Not only for the quicken format (I
> know you can import the qix files; btw are they *american* only?),
> but a lot of banks are using different formats too.

The QIF files aren't just American, though I don't have enough
examples of German and French-language files to have the correct
translations for all the investment transaction type tags.  The main
restriction on the Gnucash QIF importer right now is that it can't
handle multiple-currency QIFs.

We do not have a generic infrastructure for importing 'alien' file
formats, but all the necessary support is there to write importers for
any particular format.  Our architecture has a 'financial engine' with
a public API, so any importer just needs to interpret the contents of
the file, make any necessary translations to gnucash's financial
model, and use the public engine API to add the information to gnucash
accounts.

> Also I am able to provide a fully working ofx-server setup, with
> 15min delayed stock-quotes. I don't know if this is already being
> done, but let me know if one is needed.

That is a very nice thing to have available!  I look forward to the
time when gnucash's has enough OFX client support to use it!

Do you have some skeleton OFX client code, or could you consider 
writing some for gnucash?

Thanks,
Bill Gribble