Request for some Enhancements of Gnucash

[Christian Stimming]

Am Montag, 29. Dezember 2008 10:10 schrieb Chris Dennis:
> > 5. GIVE THE ABILITY TO EASY CREATE AND IMPORT REPORTS
> > - Without knowledge of scheme programming: create the report in another
> > format (XML ?), translated in scheme by gnucash. Is it possible ?
> > I hate parenthesis!
>
> Gnucash's current report customising system is a major problem for me too.

It is for many of us. However, the necessary effort to re-write the complete 
reporting system has still been considered too large compared to the 
necessary learning curve of using the current one.

> I am now in a position to put some work into improving it, but before I
> do, I'd like to know if anyone else is working on this area, and whether
> there's a road-map or any sort of strategy in place already.  And is
> there any documentation on the API?

The old (old, old) design explanation is in src/doc/design but its general 
explanation about reports is still valid. One online version here 
http://code.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/texi/gnucash-design_7.html#SEC112
And there is some (even older) text in 
src/report/report-system/doc/report-html.txt

As for how to access the actual accounts from within the report, unfortunately 
we don't have a nicely looking API documentation of the available Scheme 
functions anymore. In general, all C functions for accessing accounts, 
transactions and so forth are available from Scheme as well. See the doxygen 
pages for the documentation of the C functions, e.g. here  
http://cvs.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/group__Engine.html and 
http://cvs.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/group__Account.html and 
http://cvs.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/Transaction_8h.html . The SWIG tool will 
wrap those C functions so that they are available from Scheme as well, 
although with different spelling: Camel-Case is transformed into dashes. You 
will have to look into existing reports to see how the function name looks 
like in Scheme.

That's about it. 

Regards,

Christian