[PATCH] Present balance sums for sub-accounts

[FireFly]

--- On Fri, 1/15/10, Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> wrote:

> Am Freitag, 15. Januar 2010 schrieb
> FireFly:
> > Be gentle, it's my first ever patch.
> > 
> > I've always been irked by the lack of summation of
> sub-accounts for
> >  everything except the cleared column and the
> total column, personally I
> >  use present balance quite a lot, so changed that
> one to sum too
> > 
> > Unfortunately the comments on why it was not summing
> were simply comments
> >  about merging the gnome2 branch into trunk,
> which didn't tell me anything
> >  really.
> 
> Thanks for sending in the (rather simple) patch. Just for
> clarification: Did 
> you check bugzilla http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla for whether a
> similar 
> enhancement request already exists there? I think there was
> already some 
> discussion about this somewhere... Also, as your patch only
> needs to switch 
> one boolean value, I also wonder whether there were some
> important reasons for 
> having it the way it is... Bugzilla should have the
> discussion, if there were 
> any.

Christian,

Thanks for the response, and I'd go a step further personally and say the patch is incredibly simple, but I'd rather start small and poke my way around for a bit than try to make a big change and break a whole load of things.

All I can find on bugzilla is bug 565348 (actually it's an enhancement really, not a bug) and don't see any comments or notes in it, unfortunately I'm not that familiar with bugzilla yet, so I'm not sure if I'm searching the right way (I've tried a number of search key-words for the gnucash product, and can't find any other bugs that seem applicable).

I see one fix in this area for bug 459493 (which fixed the cleared column to make it sum up sub-accounts), which does list a discussion which keeps saying "original developer intent seems to have been to have the current behaviour" however, there is no reason listed anywhere as to why this was desired. Personally, the IDEAL would be to actually add an option somewhere so that the end-user can select the desired functionality (to sum up sub-accounts, or not) however that's rather out of my league of understanding the code.

My one other thought would be to include a variable (that could later be linked to a user selectable option) and set the value of that, the general concern that I have for this entire thing is how much additional processing is required for the summing of accounts, and whether that's going to cause any performance issues (I've not encountered it with my change on my accounts, however, I only have a years worth of personal data).

- James Duerr

E-mail: FireFlys_98 at yahoo.com
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