Problems with transaction cut/paste

[Gary Bickford]

Folks,
I have a couple of problems to report with 1.4.2.  These may have been
fixed already in 1.5.1?

I uploaded some qif data via pm2qif.  This went well, except that Pocket
Money (PM) doesn't maintain nested accounts - all the PM accounts showed
up in the top level of GNUCash.  I don't know what to do about that.
 Perhaps either pm2qif or the qif upload process needs a configuration
file that maps PM accounts to GNUcash accounts.  Since I know the nice
person who did pm2qif lurks on this list, I'll suggest it here.  In
fact, pending something more sophisticated it might be worthwhile to
include pm2qif in the GC distribution, or at least refer to it on the
download page if it isn't already there.

Because some of the accounts that came from PM were in the root level,
and had transactions that weren't in the account that already existed
under Income, I attempted to cut and paste the transactions from one
account to the other.  When I did so,

  1. The pasted transaction had lost both the date and the ID number.
      Since I cut instead of copy, I didn't know what the invoice no.
     and date were any more.  So I had to look them up in the old
     paperwork and re-enter that data.
  2. If I didn't previously select the empty transaction in the target
     account, it silently wrote over whatever was selected, obliterating
     existing transactions without any warning or complaint.
  3. There was an issue with debit vs. credit - everything seems to have
     come into to the pasted account on the wrong side - this may have
     to do with my setup or the very long chain of interactions between
     my Palm and GNUcash
  4. There's no undo, so I couldn't go back after making these changes.
      I also didn't recall what existed in the transactions that got
     written over, so I'll have to go back and regenerate those
     transactions from old paperwork. (It took me a couple of times to
     realize what was happening.)

Since I foolishly had not backed up GNUCash data prior to this, I'm
undecided what to do next.  I'll probably just fix everything by hand.
 It would be nice to have rollbacks...

For those who are interested, I used Gnome-Pilot to do the actual
backup/upload - this works great in Gnome 1.2 (helixcode), which is
miles ahead of the older version.  Gnome 1.2 has a panel applet that
maintains readiness to sync at any time, which is nice for managing my
calendar and so forth - just push the button on the dock.  And since it
uses a standardized conduit approach, it should be even easier for
building a more 'live' connection to GNUCash someday.  At some point I'd
like to be able to just maintain the last month or so on PM, and use it
to insert the new data but not retain the old to avoid burning all of
memory in my Palm.
GB

--
"We feel that this change will be sufficient to discourage "hackers",
although it is obviously insufficient to protect a node against a
determined and malicious attack."
- RFC521 (ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc521.txt), 1973

Gary E Bickford, mailto:garyb-at-fxt.com.
Web and content/asset management systems, PHP, XML, Apache, SQL
FXT Corp, http://www.fxt.com, tel. 541-383-2749