Troubles with reports in current SVN

[Derek Atkins]

Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> writes:

> - The menus for "Assets&Liabilities" and "Income&Expenses" are too
> full; you don't find the report you were looking for, unless you
> knew in advance it has to be in that menu. Admittantly, this was a
> problem in 1.8 as well. In SVN the "A&L" menu has 12 entries (in
> 1.8, 10); "I&E" has 11 (1.8 had 9). The HIG doesn't give a strict
> limit. It talks about a maximum of 15 entries for the whole menu,
> but when talking about grouped menu items, it says each group should
> have 2-5 items, which is less than 12. We should try to introduce
> some grouping there...

I'd go a step further and say that there are a number of reports that
are mis-categorized.  For example, the GL and GJ reports probably
belong under the top-level (or perhaps a "General Accounting Reports"
category).  They definitely do NOT belong under "A&L".

> - The text reports are *significantly* slower than in 1.8; e.g. the
> current "balance sheet" takes 8 secs with the standard options and
> in 1.8 this was 3.5 secs; same for the "account summary"; the
> current "income statement" takes 12 secs and it used to take 5. This
> is too much. I can't believe doubling the runtime is technically
> required here -- I know the 1.8 reporting code wasn't optimized for
> efficiency at all, but it nevertheless gave the correct values. I
> can't see what new features in SVN would justify this significant
> slowing down here. Especially since a response time of 3-4 secs can
> still be tolerated by the user, but 8-10 secs is really too
> much. IMHO this whole new reporting should be up for discussion
> here, potentially including a revert to the 1.8 status.

Are ALL the reports this slow?   Or only some of them?  Is there
something in common with all the "slow" reports (other than that
they are all in text)?  Maybe they all use the new html-account-table
object?

I'm not sure how best to profile the report code, but we might want to
try to figure out what's slowing it down.  For example, are we sorting
too often?

> - Some of the text report changes by David Montenegro in June/July 2004, 
> mainly in r10078, seriously reduced the feature set of the balance sheet, 
> account summary, and income/expense statement (now called income statement). 
> For example, the relative date "today" is unavailable in the account summary 
> anymore, making it unusable as a "daily startup report" which was one of the 
> key features it used to provide.

Are you sure that the date limit is specific to that report?  I
thought that the date choices were all centralized in the
report-system code.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available