Request for some Enhancements of Gnucash

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Chris Dennis <cgdennis at btinternet.com>:

> Christian Stimming wrote:
>> 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 see that someone has put a lot of effort into creating SWIG bindings
> for Python.  Does anyone know the status of this work?  Is this the way
> forward for GnuCash reports?

No.  There is no python interpreter in GnuCash..  So you can use
the python bindings to write applications in phython to handle gnucash
data, but you cannot write a python scriptlet that gnucash itself will
execute.  So no, not a report replacement.

> Alternatively, given that GnuCash has so much Scheme code in it, would
> it be a better solution to create a chunk of Scheme that processes
> report templates written in some form of pseudo-HTML (for example)?
> Then report designers could just change the report templates rather than
> having to get to grips with Scheme.

I've mentioned eguile for several years as a way to do this.  It would
be an HTML template with embedded guile in the HTML.  Then all you need
to do is modify the HTML template to form something that looks different.
However hobody has offered to do the work to integrate eguile into gnucash.

> cheers
>
> Chris

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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