Adding a 'number' field to splits

[John Ralls]

On Sep 21, 2011, at 12:14 PM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> On woensdag 21 september 2011, Alex Aycinena wrote:
>> John,
>> 
>> On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 4:09 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>>> Alex,
>>> 
>>> Sounds like a good argument to just use the Action field for your
>>> numbers. Except for option 3, no changes required to anything except
>>> your custom reports; option 3 can be implemented as easily with Action
>>> as with a new field.
>>> 
>>> Or are you already using the Action field for something else?
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> John Ralls
>> 
>> This is a good simplifying suggestion, assuming:
>> 
>> 1. The use of the Action field the way I intend doesn't interfere with
>> any other use of it within Gnucash (to respond to your question, I'm
>> not using it for anything else myself).
>> 2. It doesn't create confusion in the GUI for users.
>> 
>> I'll investigate these items and, if they prove to be OK, take that
>> route instead.
>> 
>> By the way - does anyone know of any logic in Gnucash that relies on
>> the Action field?
>> 
> I know that the business functions write to this field. Most of the 
> transactions created by the business functions contains "Invoice", "Bill" or 
> "Payment". While doing the credit notes analysis I didn't encounter any 
> function so far that relied on this info. I hope I haven't missed a part.
> 

Hmm. We should add a note in the documentation that it isn't always user-assigned.
This is what it says now:
/** The Action is an arbitrary user-assigned string.
 * The action field is an arbitrary user-assigned value.
 * It is meant to be a very short (one to ten character) string that
 * signifies the "type" of this split, such as e.g. Buy, Sell, Div,
 * Withdraw, Deposit, ATM, Check, etc. The idea is that this field
 * can be used to create custom reports or graphs of data. */

Regards,
John Ralls