Several problems and suggestions about HTML report display in GnuCash

Thu Apr 22 11:45:29 EDT 2010

On Thursday 22 April 2010, Dancefire wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have 5 issues and 2 suggestions. To make me easy, I put them in a single
>  mail.
> 
> Issue 1) All CJK characters are not shown correctly in HTML report display
>  page. I found the reason is encoding. Because all report are written in
> UTF-8, (or current locale). The encoding should be included by the
> generated HTML header. If I export the report, and use external
> browser to look at it, I have to manually select encoding to make it
> display correctly.
> 
> I got same problem in 2.3.11, which might using GtkHtml, I think the
> stable version 2.2.9 should have same problem.
> 
> There are 2 ways to fix the problem.
> 
> 1. When display a report using WebKit/GtkHtml, send current encoding
> as parameters in the loading function.
> 2. During the html report generation, add following line in
>  <head>...</head>
> 
> 		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
> 
> using correct charset to replace "UTF-8".
> 
> Issue 2) Not all characters in HTML are correctly encoded.
> 
> I have a transaction, which description is "J&J BABY WIPE TRAVEL PACK
> 20S". and in the html report, it is
> 
> <td>J&J BABY WIPE TRAVEL PACK 20S</td>
> 
> '&' should be encoded as '&amp;'
> 
> Issue 3) Generated HTML file is not conform to HTML standard.
> You can validate the generated file by http://validator.w3.org/ . It
> will show several comformation problem.
> 
> Issue 4) Hardcode HTML in generation script.
> 
> I don't think it is a good way to do that. It will strongly limited
> the way of customize report. There should be a templates, which can be
> edit by html designer. The software replace several labels in the
> template to generated report. All style should be controlled by CSS.
> And no Inline Style should be used. It's better use linked style, and
> copy the choosen CSS file to the same location of the report.
> 
> Or, you can generate report in XML format, and use different XLST to
> generate different style of report.
> 
> All above methods try to seperate generation and the HTML template,
> and seperate data and representation.
> 
> Issue 5) bug in the generation.
> During I validate my transactions report, I found "</btd>" in my file,
> which should be "</b></td>", such as
> 
> <td align="right" rowspan=1 colspan=1><b>AUD 254.70</btd>
> 
> 
> Besides, I have 2 more suggestions.
> 
> 
> 1) Remember last location of File Open/Save dialog.
> 
> I have to find my report folder every time. I don't know it's Windows
> version only or not.
> However, it should be remembered by Gnucash. Since files might store
> in diffferent location by it's type.
> For example, QIF is in download folder; GnuCash XML data may be in
> home folder; and Reports may be
> at a shared folder. If gtk+ cannot remember them differently, I think
> GnuCash should help user to
> remember them.
> 
> 2) Automatically append the extension, such as (.html), if user forgot
> append them.
> It's annoy to add the extension later if the extension is forgoten.
> File may looks missing, when folder is
> organized by sort by file type. I think it's not diffcult to do that.
> 
> 
Hi, thank you for reporting this. Your mail contains several useful 
suggestions and valid issues.

I would like to ask you though to also report these issues in our bug tracking 
system bugzilla (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla), preferably one issue 
per bug.

On the mailing list, they risk to get forgotten in the mail traffic.

Geert