GTT: Announce & Question

[James LewisMoss]

>>>>> On Tue, 4 Sep 2001 12:21:16 -0500, linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) said:

 Linas> This is an announcement & a question to the developers:

 Linas> GTT -- Gnome Time Tracker -- New version

 Linas> Instead of banging on GnuCash, I've recently turned my
 Linas> attention to Gtt, the Gnome Time Tracker, and added a
 Linas> bucket-full of new features.  These should be appearing in
 Linas> 1.4.0.99, and (a bit cleaned up) in the final gnome-1.4.

 Linas> The goal of doing this was to provide a way of gathering
 Linas> time-billing data and tying it to gnucash, so that contracting
 Linas> invoices (e.g. at law offices) could be easily prepared.

 Linas> From the NEWS file:
 Linas> -- Sub-project support has been added.  New projects can be
 Linas>      listed as subprojects of other projects.  The time totals
 Linas>      will show the total including sub-projects.  The
 Linas>      Heirarchical tree can be expanded/collapsed to simplify
 Linas>      viewing.  The tree can be re-arranged by
 Linas>      dragging-n-dopping projects.
 Linas> -- A journal showing explicit start and stop times is now
 Linas>      maintained.  Blocks of time can be annotated with memos.
 Linas>      The journal can be exported as an html page, or printed
 Linas>      (ok, printer support not yet finished).
 Linas> -- Infrastructure for storing price & billing information has
 Linas>      been put into place.  This will allow billing invoices to
 Linas>      be generated.  (not yet done, see below).
 Linas> -- The journal GUI is based on html-like pages.  This makes it
 Linas>      relatively easy to create new reports and modify the
 Linas>      format of existing reports.  Thus, custom reports, such
 Linas>      as invocies, should be coming soon.  Hopefully, we'll
 Linas>      also add a feature that allows custom reports to be
 Linas>      designed from the GUI.
 Linas> -- The above features required an expanded way of storing
 Linas>      data: and so there is now a new XML file format that
 Linas>      stores both project and journal data.
 Linas> -- Export to GnuCash coming soon, I hope ...

 Linas> ============

 Linas> So, the 'big question': what is the best way of
 Linas> tying/integrating this with gnucash?

 Linas> At a minimum, it would be good to have gtt export something
 Linas> that gnucash can import.  But what's the status on this?

 Linas> I could export a QIF file (yuck).

 Linas> I could export a gnucash-format xml file, but I don't beleive
 Linas> that there is currently any way of importing/merging-in
 Linas> 'fractional' xml files.  Would Dres, as the current maintainer
 Linas> of this code, have any comments about this?  Is this easy? 
 Linas> hard?  Could I get you to add this, or do I have to buckle
 Linas> down and do this myself?

It's easy.  Maybe a couple hundred lines of code.  Dealing with
possible doubles will make it more complex.  I'll work on it.

On that note you talked about the query interface.  I started working
on it, but haven't completed it yet.

Jim

-- 
@James LewisMoss <dres@debian.org>      |  Blessed Be!
@    http://jimdres.home.mindspring.com |  Linux is kewl!
@"Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." Bach