OFX import enhancements

[Christian Stimming]

Am Mittwoch, 19. Januar 2011 schrieb brad:
> OFX import for investment accounts has a few quirks or bugs.  One very
> frustrating thing about it is that it does the import too transparently
> and the user can't see what accounts the transaction went to (too often
> the wrong one).  If the transaction were shown in a new tab like what is
> done in with 'Scheduled Transactions' then the user could see what
> happened & fix it.  There's a click box to 'Review created transactions'
> when getting 'since last run' scheduled transactions, this is what I had
> in mind.
> How hard will this be to implement?   I'm willing to take a crack at it
> unless the experienced developers here say it's too hard for a novice.
> I've done a fair amount of C, but nothing like this.

Unfortunately I have to warn you here: This is a rather major task, because 
creating a new GUI window for the to-be-implemented transaction is a lot of 
unfriendly work in the current gtk/C platform.

(This is one of the main reasons for me to have tried C++/Qt in the cutecash 
experiment, but I guess you won't gain much by implementing your desired 
feature in cutecash instead of gnucash, because even though cutecash can edit 
your gnucash file, it is still lacking a lot of the interesting features of 
gnucash. http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Cutecash If you feel like you would like 
to learn something new, I would suggest trying to write an import GUI in 
cutecash, but then again, it isn't clear what the future of that experiment 
will be.)

> Another feature I'd like to take a look at is using the fund/stock
> prices from an OFX import and putting that data in the price db.  My
> 401k has funds which are not listed so 'get quotes' doesn't work.  On
> the surface this one sounds easier to me.

Theoretically yes, but in practice the OFX import is done by the external 
library "libaqbanking". That is, first you need to find out whether 
libaqbanking reads the ofx fields that you want. If not, you have to get into 
libaqbanking and write code there that reads it and extend its interfaces so 
that gnucash can obtain the data. If you are that far, then yes, indeed this 
can't be too difficult and maybe this is a good task for a newcomer. However, 
if the aqbanking library interfaces need to be changed, it's a rather 
difficult task.

Regards,

Christian