GTT: Announce & Question

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 03:38:43PM -0400, James LewisMoss was heard to remark:
> >>>>> 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> 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.  

OK, excellent.

> Dealing with
> possible doubles will make it more complex.  I'll work on it.

I can put guid's in the data, so detecting doubles should be easy.
I guess I'll need export a 'date of last modification', so that 
the import updates a duplicate only if its newer.

we'll need this kind of 'last-modified' for accounts & prices ...
not just transactions.

There's some other hard questions, I think. What should I do with 
double-entry?  Its very tempting to just export unbalanced transactions,
and let te importer deal with the the 'other half'.  Presumably, 
the other half goes into some account payable ... but how to match
them up ??

Have similar vaguenesses for the account structures.... and how projects
map to accounts.  Again, haven't thought it through.  I think some
experimentation is in order ...

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

Oh, great, excellent!   Got to dust off that code.  I guess I can
re-think the same set of issues for gtt (i.e. can I make it
client-server excahging xml between them), and then ask more broadly,
'how does this generalize'?  Am I reinventing the same thing over &
over?  How can I automate this?

--linas