Plugin API?

[John Ralls]

On Feb 5, 2011, at 1:16 PM, Ryan M. Ward wrote:

> 
> Hello all,
> I originally included this in my last email but felt it was worth its own thread. Have there been discussions developing support for custom GNUCash plugins(or does this support exist and I have just simply missed it)? As far as plug in support, I have some fairly sophisticated ideas in mind ranging from custom reports (which is pretty much already built in) to the ability to plug in custom fields in the ledger, plugins for interest estimation, bill reminder plugin and/or bill reminder system daemon, plugins for adding payments to a google account calendar, etc... I think there is a huge amount of potential here.

Well... Gnucash already does use plugins. We've been slowly changing them into regular dylibs to make testing and debugging easier and to speed up starting the program (since most of the plugins get loaded at startup anyway). But the capability to connect is there.

I think all of your ideas are doable with the possible exception of adding custom fields to the ledger (by which I imagine that you mean the Register pages; the ledger is a report in Gnucash). The register is a big steaming pile that was essentially ported over from Gtk+1 and isn't going to be receptive to adding fields to it. That said, the Register needs to be rewritten using more recently available widgets (e.g., the GtkTreeControl family) to get it ready for Gtk+3. It might be feasible to provide a plugin facility as part of that rewrite.

Regards,
John Ralls