Import transactions change proposal

[Derek Atkins]

Chris Morgan <chrismorgan at rcn.com> writes:

> I'm skeptical of the quality of the auto matcher, both as a
> user and a developer.  I suppose I still like the idea of
> being able to manually identify and move transactions if I
> choose to.  I'm ok with not going this route right now but I
> do think users will find it useful.

Admittedly the auto-matcher right now isn't very good -- but it errs
on the side of false-negatives rather than false-positives.

> This one is pretty simple.  If you have multiple transactions
> selected and want to process them in a batch then you'll have
> to settle for having each choice made apply to the entire
> batch.  I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.

The UI aspects are not as simple as you think.  Benoit, Christian,
David, Chris, and myself spent endless hours on #gnucash and here
trying to come up with a reasonable UI.  Some of the things we wanted
to do just are not possible (e.g. the widget cell-type).  It may
_appear_ simple, but the devil is in the details.

> I wouldn't mind working on the interative processing of the
> transaction list.  I'm at a loss as to how this would be
> implemented.  Is is as simple as just calling the auto matcher
> routine after any transaction has been assigned to an account?

Benoit already laid out what needs to happen.  Basically, yes, every
time the user manually sets the destination account for a transaction
you need to re-iterate through the list of transactions and update any
transaction that was not marked as "manually edited".  Just make sure
you don't recurse ;)

Then, of course, we need to improve the match mapper -- right now it
only matches on full-strings.  We would need to add logic to match on
partial strings, or perhaps even a scheme hook to allow the matching
to be a bit more pluggible.  I think the API needs some more thought,
now that we have a bit more experience with it.

> Chris

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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