Almost duplicate transactions

[Benoit Grégoire]

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On Thursday 11 March 2004 09:09, davehall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just reviewed this entire thread.  The bottom line seems to be that
> there is some sort of difficulty with recognizing asset->asset transfers
> when importing QIF or OFX files.
>
> I'm in about the same boat as Chris R. - I'm trying to use GnuCash to
> track my cash flow month to month.  In my case I would like to import
> OFX files for about 8 asset files and have the transfers between them
> all matched up.  Not suprisingly I am also having the same symptoms as
> Chris.
>
> As I'm just getting started on this I've been letting GnuCash set up my
> accounts as I import each OFX file.  Is it possible that I need to
> choose a different account type when creating the accounts?  (The
> default seems to be 'Bank'.)

No, if you let the OFX importer create the accounts for you, they will always 
be of an appropriate type.

> If necessary and possible I would even write a script to pre-process my
> OFX files to get the transfers to work.  Can you suggest any
> documentation or resources in this respect.

No, writing a script won't help.  There are several issues, but the biggest 
one is a conceptual problem for the importer:  It considers the imported 
transaction as a group of transaction to be matched against elements of 
another, static, group (the existing transactions)...  To solve this in a 
generic (read:  even for banks not providing proper payee information for the 
transfer), the importer will have to allow the imported transactions to match 
against themselves, which isn't hard to implement in the current code 
(basically a constant to change and a check so a transaction will never match 
against itself.  However, it opens up a whole new class of very hairy UI 
problems:  for instance what happens if you set a transaction as matching a 
second one, and set that second one as matching a third?  Or set a fourth 
transaction as matching a fifth, but not import the fift?

These are all solvable issues, but they are neither trivial, nor simple (They 
only appear so, I only scratched the surface here, and they are hard to solve 
without spagetti code).  

So, I guess the best way to solve this would be to work on improving the 
importer.  It's 99% C and currently the most documented part of GnuCash. 

- -- 
Benoit Grégoire, http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/
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