Request for some Enhancements of Gnucash

[Phil Longstaff]

On January 2, 2009 09:33:24 am Derek Atkins wrote:
> 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.

I've been wondering about using an SQL report engine once we move to the SQL 
backend.  Papyrus (http://www.treshna.com/papyrus/), for example, uses an XML 
report format and can produce PDF, HTML and other formats.  SQL can easily 
generate an account balance at a given date.  However, other numbers, such as 
average price, would be harder.

Phil