Bulk transaction mover (was: question about importing .qif files)

[Christopher Browne]

> > 2.  Which of those "walks" are worthy of trying to build a GUI
> >     in order to make them usable to non-Scheme-gurus?
> 
> Since I don't know scheme (and only know enough lisp
> to tweak my .emacs), this is what I would like to see.
> Feel free to comment, argue, flame, whatever...
> 
> 
> Query:
>         [any] [all]         [more] [fewer]
> 
>         [field1] [match1] [criteria1]
>         [field2] [match2] [criteria2]
> 
> Action:
> 	[action] [option] [...]
> 	[more]
> 
> 
> Fields are "memo", "amount", "payee", etc.
> Matches are "contains", "doesn't contain", "begins with", 
>         "ends with", maybe "matches glob", and "matches regexp"
> Criteria is free form text to match against.
> 
> Any triggers a "hit" on boolean or of criteria
> All triggers a "hit" on boolean and of criteria
> 
> More adds another line of criteria (or action) to the list
> Fewer removes a line of criteria from the list
> 
> 
> Possible actions are:
> 	"select matching transactions"
>         "set field" with options "memo", "payee", etc.
>         "delete transaction" (no options)
> 
> 
> For example, on my credit card QIF, I'd like to:
> 
> Query:  MEMO  STARTS-WITH  [PETSMART]
> Action: SET-FIELD CATEGORY Pets
> Action: SET-FIELD PAYEE Petsmart

Interesting...

That represents a _third_ way that I hadn't thought of, namely of having a 
simple user-oriented "query language" that might then be transformed into an 
update query.  I was sort of assuming that the goal was to have a GUI as the 
primary way of activating these "filters," but this is surely a reasonable 
alternative that may even be easy to work with to create a GUI.

[Aside: Bill, I agree with you that it would be appropriate to use the Query 
API to specify how to "walk" the transactions.]

One concern here is that this moves this towards being almost like SQL, and if 
we're creating _almost SQL_, it may make more sense to just plain use SQL.  
But I digress, and don't have time for that today...
--
cbbrowne@acm.org - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
You shouldn't anthropomorphize computers; they don't like it.