[Fwd: Re: Online OFX import of Investment Statements]

[Stephen R. Besch]

Apparently this didn't get posted to the list, as it should have. I sent 
it only to Martin - so for the historical record:

Martin,

Actually, the patches should have no effect at all on other 
applications. I was very careful to make sure that the behavior of the 
patched aqbanking routines was absolutely identical to the pre-patched 
behavior, as long as there was no file named /dev/shm/aqbanking/ofx.ofx. 
As long as that file is not present, then the changes should be 
invisible to any other applications. The possibility of there being such 
a file by accident on someone's installation is very small indeed.

Second, it has no effect on the importation of bank account transactions 
into GnuCash. The OFX file with the banking transactions simply gets 
parsed by the File->Import->OFX/QFX... importer and from that point on 
the user cannot tell the difference. In fact, I've been using the 
patched program for a while now to import bank, credit card and 
investment transactions. The bank transactions import exactly as they 
did in the past.

Lastly, I've also tried to get the investment part of aqbanking working. 
In fact, I've submitted quite a bit of code that succesfully imports 
everything in the investment transaction list except stock transactions 
(i.e, dividends and cash transactions work). The problem is that getting 
the stock stuff to work is a great deal more difficult - in fact no one 
would even offer any help at all regarding the next steps that I might 
take. This patch is so simple that it's hard for me to justify investing 
the time to duplicate the effort that's already been put into the 
investment import that the File->Import->OFX/QFX... function provides.

Steve Besch

Martin Preuss wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> On Donnerstag, 4. Juni 2009, Stephen R. Besch wrote:
> [...]
> > 1) Patch aqbanking to simply save a copy of the OFX data returned
> > from the bank, skipping any attempt at parsing the file.
> [...]
>
>
> Hmm... I have a bit of a problem to commit the AqBanking patches. The 
> idea behind the AqBanking library is to do what's required to return a 
> list of transactions by any means necessary (in this case: OFX Direct 
> Connect). Even though your approach might work well with your patched 
> version of GnuCash it might not work with other applications. It would 
> also prevent AqBanking from importing bank account transactions (which 
> currently works reasonably well).
>
>
> So from my point of view as AqBanking developer the correct approach 
> would be to make the OFX parser of AqBanking parse the additional 
> information rather than preventing the parser to work on OFX data at all.
>
>
>
> Regards
> Martin
>
>
>
> -- 
> "Things are only impossible until they're not"
>
>
> Martin Preuss - http://www2.aquamaniac.de/
> AqBanking - http://www.aqbanking.de/
> LibChipcard - http://www.libchipcard.de/
>
>