GnuCash page on GO site

[Linas Vepstas]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 01:43:18AM +1100, msevior at physics.unimelb.edu.au was heard to remark:
> 
> I wasn't suggesting this code be in AbiWord. I was meant that we could
> invent some fields that could be filled *explicitly* by GNUcash. AbiWord
> would call out to the external GNUcash program via a plugin to extract the
> values of the fields.

Yes,... 
I was thinking of a relationship similar to that between glade
and libglade.  In this analogy, abiword is like glade.  

glade                               abiword
-----                               ========
The GUI designer uses              The form designer uses
glade to design a gui.             abiword to create a form.

His GUI has a text box             She uses abiword to create
widget, and the name of            a dunning letter. "Dear sir,
that text box is "total"           you owe us (_total_) dollars.
                                   Sincerely, William Sue,esq."

C Programmer uses libglade          C programmer does ???
to access the GUI. Programmer       to push a value into 
does a GtkTextView *txt_w =         (_total_).
glade_xml_get_widget("total");
then does
gtk_textview_set_text(txt_w,
"$123.45"); 
to insert text into that widget.

Programmer does                    Programmer does ???
gtk_widget_show(txt_w);            to cause the resulting 
to make the GUI visible.           form letter to display/print.


The above is a "push" model where gnucash pushes data into
the form. 

I suppose we could do a pull rather than a push, put pulls
are technically a whole lot harder, orders of magnitude harder,
because then we get into the whole question of what's dwi, 
whats qof, what's libgda do.

> Yes. It occured to me you could re-use the your existing code that
> generates HTML. 

yes, well that existing code is the existing gnucash "reporting 
engine" and its not extensible, its hard to create new reports, 
its slow, the visual layout is lacking, there's no wysiwyg 
designer etc.  Which is why we are having this conversation :-).

--linas


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