QIF importer treatment of zero-sum split transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Quoting Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com>:

> There is some code in the QIF importer which says that if a QIF split
> transaction adds up to zero, then the signs of all of its split lines must
> get reversed.  It looks very deliberate. Does anyone know why this would
> be?  It is causing a problem: because the signs get reversed, any split
> lines that contain a transfer between accounts don't match up properly with
> the other half of the transfer, causing the importer to create an extra,
> spurious transaction. (Try importing the attached QIF to see what I mean.)

Yes, I remember adding that code a long time ago to handle the import
of certain types of transactions created by, IIRC, either Money or
Quicken.  So yes, it's very deliberate.  I'm pretty sure there's a
bugID attached to the changeset; feel free to look for that.

The biggest problem with QIF is that there really is no standard.  There
are so many different ways to doing it that getting it right 100% of the
time is impossible.  If you fix it for person A, you break it for person
B.  So the only way to get it to work for both people are to ask the
user about ambiguities, or to include additional information in your
decision on how to interpret the data.

> Cheers,
> Charles

-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
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