Some oddities in gnucash-cvs

Rik Harris rik@kawaja.net
Thu, 12 Dec 2002 20:28:40 +1100


On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 06:54:27PM +1100, Rik Harris wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 09:39:45AM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > Rik Harris <rik@kawaja.net> writes:
> > > 4.  When I search for |Value| |<anything>| |is equal to| |<any amount>|,
> > >     I get a bunch of unrelated share transactions.  It returns the same
> > >     transactions every time.  Should I be able to use this for searching
> > >     for transaction amounts?
> > 
> > Hmm.. Could you provide more information on this one?  Do you have
> > multi-currency transactions?  It is possible that I messed this up,
> > but I need more information to know how to test it to reproduce it.

I've reported this on bugzilla with a simple test case that may or may
not be tickling the same problem.

With a bit of further use, and on a tangental path, I find that I
may well also have multi-currency transactions, but not deliberately.
The following things seem to have happened.

1.  My default currency was reset from AUD to GBP.  I don't know when
    this happened.

2.  When I start GnuCash, I get a message saying:

    ";;; WARNING (gnc:resolve-unknown-comm: Oops - exchange rate
    ambiguity error:  £0.00  =  500 CMLC)"

    (my currency should be AUD, not GBP as implied by this error
    message).

3.  I entered some share transactions.  These were additions to my stock
    holding due to a share allotment (a bonus issue).  Not having looked
    at the Stock Split Action, I did not realise that it could be used
    to create the appropriate transaction here, so I manually created a
    transaction.  I entered 922 (the number of addtional shares allotted
    in the 'shares' column, then accidently left the '1' in the 'price'
    column.  GnuCash faithfully calclated the buy price as '922.00'.  It
    then appeared to need an account to balance the transaction (now
    that cash is involved, it needs both sides of the transaction).
    Since I had previously recorded the 'current' price for allotments
    in this sort of transaction and balanced the transaction to an
    Equity account (since no money is actually changing hands, it
    shouldn't end up in my P&L), I used an Equity account to record the
    other side of this transaction.

    Now, it appears that because my default currency had been reset,
    this transaction was recorded in GBP.  The only way I can tell this
    is by looking at the XML file, becase when I try to select 'Edit
    Exchange Rate', I get the popup: "You need to expand the transaction
    in order to modify the exchange rates".  I don't get this message
    with other transactions that had been entered previously (or since).
    I don't actually understand how you can change the currency for a
    single transaction, but that could just be my misunderstanding.

The only way around this I could see was to fix the default currency,
delete the transaction and re-enter it (manually or with the Stock Split
Druid), but I came across some other problems re-entering some of the
transactions (which I've reported as bug id 101007) so I can't yet tell
whether this has fixed the problem or not.  The error message in (2)
goes away when I delete the offending transaction.

I manually edited the XML file to change GBP to AUD, which got rid
of the messages in (2), but didn't fix the find.

These may or may not be bugs - they may just be a result of me mucking
up my data file by using a succession of CVS versions of GnuCash -
so I haven't reported them on bugzilla.

thanks,
rik.