Invoices and Bills

[Lindenaar, D.J.W.]

Hi,
I'm sending this email in reply to an email sent to the user-list. Since 
i'm  possibly going to be a little technical, i'd thought it better fit 
for the development list.(correct me if I'm wrong...)

Derek Atkins wrote:

>Hi,
>
>"Ruit, K. van de" <K.v.d.Ruit at student.tue.nl> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Hello,
>>
>>I'm having problems with Bills and Invoices:
>>
>>    
>>
>[snip]
>  
>
>>So at the end of the month, I would like the overview the costs made
>>on maintenance and all I can find is the company's names that send
>>me the bill.
>>
>>Is this a Bug, or am I making mistakes?
>>    
>>
>
>Neither -- this is how it's designed to work.  The invoice/bill system
>does not copy the specific line-items into the CoA.  
>
Why doesn't it do that? Is this a limitation from gnucash, i.e. is it 
impossible to have multiple splits in a transaction pointing to the same 
account? Or is it simply because this way was chosen and nobody had a  
problem with this.

>If you want to
>track a specific item (ala inventory) then you should create an
>account specific to that widget and use that instead of a general
>catch-all account.  (Gnucash doesn't support inventory, so that's the
>best you can do at the moment).
>
>-derek
>  
>
Well, it would be nice in an account to track printing expenses to have, 
for example in a bill from the office-supplies store, a line for paper 
and a line for a cardridge, even when they were billed on the same 
invoice. Or even when they were not on the same bill, to have the 
information entered in the invoice-dialog.

I can see, from inspecting gncInvoice.c, that the issue is due to the 
fact that multiple items that transfer to the same account are 
accumulated into a single split. It is obvious that a common memo has to 
be used in case multiple lines are combined, but is this necessary?

If i would be writing a patch, i think it would be nice to have a flag 
in the gncInvoice structure stating wether or not the splits must be 
accumulated, any suggestions?
Which tree should I use to write this patch?

greetz Daniel
p.s. why can't I open the .glade files in glade? i've got Glade 0.6.4 
and Glade 2.6.0. and the source tree from a source .deb in debian 
unstable...