Test report: Scheduled Transactions

[Josh Sled]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 11:17:14PM -0400, Tim Wunder wrote:

| OK. Finally got CVS with Scheduled Transactions to compile and my system 
| doesn't barf all over it...

CVS stability seems to be at a time-local maxima. :)

| 2 - My Sceduled Transaction set for 10/19/2001 for my wife's pay didn't show 
| up.

Indeed; unless you had selected to have reminders about the transaction
some number of days in advance, that will be empty.  See further comments
on empty pages below.

| I'm then presented with a dialog called Auto-Created Transaction 
| Notifications. It displyed what looked to be part of my checking account 
| register, with the date highlighted, but no transaction data.  I'm guessing 
| that this is where my wife's 10/19/2001 payday should appear. But it surely 
| wasn't there. 

Yes, it should have been there... in our IRC discussion, we subsequently
saw it happen both ways... obviously merits some further investigation.

| The display is quite whacked, too.

You should have seen it when it was growing in 8- by 4-pixel increments
w/o bound over the weekend... ;)

But, yes... it doesn't quite draw itself correctly when that page is
flipped to... something on my todo list.

| Next dialog is the To-Create Transaction Preparation. Whatever that's 
| supposed to be...I think it needs a better name, perhaps "Pending 
| Transactions", or "Prepare Pending Transactions", or "Pending Transaction 
| Preparation", or "Prepare Transactions for Creation". Nothing was listed. I 

"Prepare Transactions for Creation" I like...  I've never liked "Pending"
because they're not... I think of "pending" as those that aren't in the
process of being created... those that are out in the future.  These are
not pending: they either should have been created in the time intervale
since you last ran GnuCash, or are to-be-created today...

| know this, but I gotta say it, anyway, if there are none, don't present the 
| dialog. 

Indeed; this is a freshly-implemented dialog, and I didn't have time to
complete it fully over the weekend.  There's also some question about
the best way to go about that; should it just not show those dialogs at
all, or maybe tell the user up-front that "there's nothing relevant for
the following stages of this dialog, so we'll skip them".  I'm all about
consistency so people can build mental maps and models, so simply dropping
the pages worries me a bit.

| Finally, I'm presented with an Obsolete Sceduled Transactions dialog. Hmmm. 
| What's this? My wife's payday is listed. But, my only option appears to be to 
| select it and delete it. I don't wanna do that. I wanna have it entered. I 

This turned out to be a freshly-introduced bug in the SX editor. :(
It's fixed in my tree, should be in CVS later tonight...

| leave it unselected and click <Finish>. Nothing happens. Click <Finish> 
| again, nothing happens. Click <Cancel>, nothing happens. Click <X>, the 
| dialog closes.

Yup... not-finished-dialog stuff.

| Other thoughts, is there a way to configure a fixed loan, such as a mortgage 
| or auto loan, so that scheduled transactions are created for the loan? This 
| would be especially neat for those folks who have automated withdrawals done 
| for mortgaes. 

Indeed; this can probably be done, though my shallow initial thought
about it is that it'd be benefited by some "advanced" SX functionality I
wasn't planning on implementing real soon...  I'll think some more about
this in the near future.

...jsled