Generic Transaction import discussion

[John F Meinel Jr]

I had a question about the transaction importing capabilities.  I'm 
working with freecoins (a free account manager for the Palm OS), and I 
was wanting to make it sync with gnucash.  I know I've mentioned it 
before, but I wanted to give my general background.

The question is, if you already have a listing of files in double-entry 
bookkeeping, what is the best way to get them imported into gnucash.  As 
far as I'm aware, the only import mechanism is QIF files.  And from the 
discussions I've been reading, and from what I've read about the QIF 
spec [albeit not a lot], they don't support that style.  You just have 
simple transactions [not linked to another transaction].

We've been able to create an XML file that gnucash will read as a 'real' 
gnucash account file, however, I don't believe there is a way to merge 
these transactions with another account.  Is there plans to do this?  Is 
it planned but won't happen for some time?  I'm willing to scratch an 
itch here, except what I saw in the qif import, it was written in 
Scheme, and I don't know enough about functional languages to make it 
work.  I'm pretty good in C/C++, a little bit of Java, etc, but I'm an 
engineer, not a comp sci major :).

The basic goal would be a program that takes the database files from 
freecoins, tries to import them into gnucash [possibly with user help], 
and then removes everything except account summaries, and possibly the 
last few weeks [adjustable] worth of transactions.

Am I going to have to work with an XML parser and manually change the 
gnucash account file? That sounds like a good way to break a lot of 
stuff.  Is there a simple method for importing an XML file instead of a 
QIF file?  Do QIF files support splits and I'm just not aware of it?

Any answers would be appreciated.
John
=:->