Bugs and other things in the reports

[Conrad Canterford]

The recent modifications to the account summary report has made me take
a look at the reports. I realise these are a "work in progress", but
some of these issues may have been overlooked.

General comments:

- Despite what I thought was a correctly set locale, the following
things are not appearing correctly in the reports:
 * dates on both the plot and the report proper are in US format (they
are not on the register, nor are they in the date picker in the report
prefs).
 * the default reporting currency on the account summary report is USD,
not AUD.

- The Account Picker in the report prefs is a great idea, but:
 * It does not fit intuitively with the "subaccounts" checkbox/number of
account levels dropdown box in the reports. Personally, I'd do away with
the checkbox/drop-down box and pull all information from the Account
Picker. This has the added advantage that (with savable reports) a user
could save a particular selection quite easily, and it would be obvious
what was being reported on, and what was not.
 * It does not work intuitively, to my mind at least. See my thoughts
below.

- Some signs appear to be reversed? My income was showing as a negative
on both reports.

- The barchart on the average account balance tracker report was showing
average balances between some extremely small negative number and 4.E-13
when all accounts were selected (ie should really be 0). This is
obviously rounding errors somewhere, but it was a bit confusing until I
worked out what was going on. Also some of the zero values are -0 rather
than just 0 in the table.

- Beware of memory leaks. I was using the full dataset (about 12 months
worth of transactions). I didn't pursue this, but it was obviously
slowing down on about the 5th or 6th change to a report. I might add as
a more general comment that on this dataset it is pretty slow at the
best of times. Getting slower was too much!

Specific comments on the Account Summary report:

- The interaction between the account picker and the # of subaccount
levels dropdown box leads to some interesting effects, including
duplicated (sub)accounts, etc. 

- The order that accounts are displayed in the report appears to be a
LIFO stack of the order they were selected in the Account picker (the
accounts are not sorted at all). This means that "select all" produces
your account tree "upside down" as it walks the tree. I think this is
bad. The account order should be sorted to match the account order as
displayed in the (current) main window.

- The report currency and show foreign currency checkbox don't work as
I'd expect - despite my report currency being set to USD (and "show
foreign currencies" off), my AUD values still showed up as AUD values.
Maybe this just hasn't been done yet.

- Changing the report currency: change it from its default to another
currency. Once you have done that (drop-down box now shows the new
currency as report currency), click on the "default" button for the
report currency and it changes back to the default currency. Now, try to
change the currency back to the first currency you changed it to. You
cannot, as that currency is still "selected" in the drop-down box,
although it is not showing in the top box. You have to select a
different currency first, and then change it again. 

Account Picker thoughts:

- I think it would be good if the view provided a more complete picture
of what was or was not selected. By default, when I open the report, all
the top-level accounts are selected. Of course, I can't tell anything
about the selected/unselected state of subaccounts. If I click on
"select all", now all accounts are selected, but visually, nothing
changes. I think the accounts need to be a tristate thing. Normal when
they and all subaccounts are unselected, a pale colour when they and/or
some subaccounts are selected, and a darker colour when they AND all
subaccounts are selected.
This could be expanded to a ridiculous degree if people feel really like
going for glitz. I can imagine something continuous range of pale to
dark colours, and the top level account will vary its colour along that
range depending on the % of selected/unselected subaccounts. 

- I think that all subaccounts of a selected top-level account should be
all selected by default. Maybe I'm just odd, but my top level accounts
contain nothing but subaccounts.

Alright, that's enough negativity.
I'm available for further explanations and testing as required. Email
me, or catch me on IRC.

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford (conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au)
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