Querying GNUcash from external programs?

[Dave Peticolas]

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On Thu, 2001-09-20 at 17:45, Ian Warford wrote:
>=20
> I've begun the process of taking over the FreeCoins<->GNUCash conduit,
> and I'm researching possible approaches.
>=20
> My initial approach looks like it's frontend is going to be written in
> Perl, and linked into pilot-manager, as well as having a command-line
> frontend.   I'm after comments and thoughts on how best to go about the
> backend of it.
>=20
> I've gone through 3 different approaches in my mind right now :
>=20
> (1) If GNUCash is modular enough, write a set of functions that act as a
> 'headless' GNUCash, loading the specified data file in, and keeping
> it in memory.  Then use the Query API, and various other functions to
> update the data back and forth between the Freecoins database, and then
> save the file to the drive.  How this would interact with a running
> GNUCash is really the question.

GnuCash 1.6 does create a shared library just for the engine,
so that is a reasonable approach. However, the engine by itself
doesn't have any support for script language bindings.

GnuCash-the-app does support scheme bindings for the engine so
you could create a guile script that is invoked from perl.


> (2) Parse the GNUCash data files from scratch.  This still leaves worryin=
g
> about interaction with a running GNUCash process.

You don't want to do this.


> (3) Use some form of IPC to talk to GNUCash while it's running.

GnuCash 1.6 doesn't support this at all. The development version
should soon have an xml-rpc interface.

dave


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