GnuCash reports via eguile - probably not

[Chris Dennis]

Hello folks

I've been looking into ways of adapting eguile[1] to make it easier to 
write GnuCash reports as HTML templates with bits of embedded Scheme code.

It works up to a point -- the point at which it fails completely.

I've merged code from the hello-world.scm report with eguile, and 
created a template that works with GnuCash.  BUT it can't access any 
variables from GnuCash, so it's a bit pointless.

The show-stopper is that 'eval-string' runs in with a top-level (i.e. 
empty) environment, so it's impossible to pass parameters (such as 
report-obj) to any of the code in the template.

Thinking it through, even if it were possible to pass parameters to the 
template code, we'd be opening a huge security risk.  We'd be 
encouraging Joe User to create a template containing code that has full 
access to the workings of GnuCash.

What is really needed is some sort of wiki-like markup that can be 
parsed by Guile code and includes references to GnuCash objects. 
Something like this (I know the 'variable' names I've used are very 
un-GnuCash-like), for which I've used TiddlyWiki-like markup:

   !Invoice $invoice-no
   !!$company-name
   $company-address
   |!Date |!Description | Qty| Cost| Total|
   $for-each-invoice-line
   |$inv-item-date[i] |!inv-item-desc[i] | $inv-item-qty[i]| \
       $inv-item-cost[i]| $inv-item-total[i]|
   $end-for
   |"Total" |   |   |   | "$inv-total"|

I wrote something similar many years ago (in Turbo Pascal, and creating 
LaTeX code), but I don't really want to reinvent that wheel.

Does anyone know of a suitable Guile/Scheme module for doing this sort 
of thing?

cheers

Chris

[1] http://woozle.org/~neale/src/eguile/
-- 
Chris Dennis                                  cgdennis at btinternet.com
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK