creating accounts by hand in the xml-file

[Josh Sled]

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 12:33 +0200, Andreas Fromm wrote:
> I would like to write a tool that creates a list of accounts in
> gnucash based on a list of names I pass in. Can I just insert the new
> account-subtree into the xml-file without blowing up everything? How
> do I get a valid 'act:id' value for a new account?

Yes, you can.  It will be important to understand gnucash's concepts of
"type" and "commodity" first.  The accounts form a tree via
parent-pointers (by GUID), so that must be respected.

Account ID's are simply GUIDs; in gnucash, GUIDs are hex-encoded strings
of MD5-generated random values.  They do not have any internal structure
or semantic.  Any sufficiently-random source of data will work to reduce
the chance of natural collisions with existing GUIDs. See [1] for the
gory details.

Certainly, you should only work on a data-file backup and test it out
before entering Important Data.


> Andreas Fromm

...jsled

[1] http://cvs.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gnucash/src/engine/guid.c?rev=1.25.4.9;content-type=text%2Fplain

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