Reporting system and potentially Python

[Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 04:16:10PM -0500, Yawar Amin wrote:
> Hi Hendrik,
> 
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com>wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> > One of the hallmarks of Scheme is its metaprogrammability, for
> > applications just like this.  And its simple syntax promotes this.
> >
> 
> I've started writing a proof-of-concept declarative report (
> https://github.com/yawaramin/gc-decl-reports/blob/master/hello-world.scm ).
> It doesn't really do anything other than populate a few options into the
> report options dialog box, and render a few lines of HTML. I'm trying to
> come up with a flexible format for pushing the accounting data around
> internally, so that it can filtered, sorted, and grouped, and then shown in
> either a tabular or graphical layout.
> 
> If you want to try it out, just copy over hello-world.scm and replace your
> version of it (in your GnuCash install's shared reports directory) with my
> one.
> 
> [...]
> >
> > But as I've said elsewhere, the greatest barrier users encounter in
> > trying to use the existing reporting tools isn't that they're written in
> > Scheme.  It's that the API they use is undocumented.  That's something I
> > hope to do something about.
> 
> 
> Very true. Are you planning to start up a wiki page? Maybe we can pool
> efforts.

Pooling efforts is the only thing that makes sense.  But perhaps that 
should be on a wiki page specifically dedicated as a draft Guile API 
page, rather than as your personal page.  I don't feel good editing 
other peoples' personal pages.

First, though, I'm setting up my development environment, and trying to 
get over a bout of some kind of mild stomach flu.  And I'll have to get 
some kiind of feel for the system's internals before I really feel free 
to start documenting it.  Except for maybe a bit of personal 
development diary and function descriptions that start like "Could this 
possibly be the function that ..."

And it's more than just API that's needed.  There's also things like 
how to run gnucash-env to run scheme code on its right 
environment (as mentioned in another post on this forum; thanks, 
derek).

My personal development log will probably tell me the unobvious about 
what needs to be documented.

As for your draft declarative report, I'm not ready yet.

-- hendrik