Importing Revisited

[Wiggins d'Anconia]

blfs wrote:
> This can be implemented in a gazillion different ways,
> but in the end there should be data in the program
> that resembles
> 
> struct check{
>     char *number;
>     char *payee;
>     char *amount;
>     char *memo;
>     char *etc;
> };
> 
> Now what I am not understanding is why is it not trivial
> to import flat text data into this program.  
> 
> There are two possible explanations.  The first being that
> there is no such animal as a check in the program.  At
> least not one that resembles the structure above.
> 
> The second is the concern that just importing a bunch of
> checks would throw the ledger out of balance.  Usually 
> programs handle this by having a post function in the program.  The checks dont go to the GL until they are 
> posted.
> 
> Can someone please enlighten me here.
> 

The point is still that gnucash is based on double entry accounting. At 
the very least you need to have something similar to,

struct transaction {
    acct *debit;
    acct *credit;
    char *amount;
    ....
};

The key being that there has to be an entry into multiple accounts, and 
there has to be some meta data to initially create the accounts for the 
transactions to be entered into, that is not even talking about various 
currency differences, account types, non-trivial transactions (aka 
transactions that may be across more than two accounts, such as salary 
-> actual pay, taxes, soc. security, etc.). So then your structure 
becomes even more complex because you can have an arbirtrary number of 
debit/credit accounts... blah blah blah.   Still comes down to the fact 
that you have to have a way to represent all of this, and generally 
single lines in a flat text file won't work.

Having said that, what everyone has said is that it will work, you just 
have to make sure that there is enough data in the flat text file to map 
to the type of structures that GnuCash uses, and then write the filter. 
  It isn't that it can't be done, its that you are the only one that 
understands the format you have and what information would map to which 
parts, not to mention you are the only one that has the motivation to do 
it since everyone else appears to prefer (or use) QIF, etc.

At this point I think the discussion has gone long enough, if you don't 
trust the developers are correct, then that is the beauty of open 
source, prove them wrong.  By the way I am not a GnuCash developer, just 
a listener standing by...

Soon to have Perl questions ;-)....

http://danconia.org