Help with OFX in Gnucash

[Muslim Chochlov]

Hi all,

Please keep in mind that Ngewi is working on a GSoC project, which means he
is limited in time. And the best solution to his issue should be a tradeoff
between user experience and effort required to implement it.
When we were discussing mobile application project, we decided to focus on
the application itself and get as much as we can of existing GnuCash import
functionality. The reason is that implementing mobile application from the
scratch and modifying/extending GnuCash import functionality was a bit too
much for the scope of GSoC.
The choice was between OFX and QIF. We decided to go for well defined
format and unique transaction identification. I agree that concept of OFX
doesn't exactly match with our requirements of reliability and user
friendliness, but out of those two it was a better option.
Now the OFX export is done and it is not going anywhere. Of course it is
possible to add other export options later and I think this actually should
be done in the future. We don't want to limit our users by just one export
format.
So to rephrase Ngewi's question - if it is possible to improve user
experience with the current OFX functionality having 4-5 weeks left.


> * Support an account having multiple ids (and a simple gui to manage it).
> Note that the account id can be any 22 caracters,and are displayed to the
> user
> at account matching, so there is nothing stopping you from having them
> meaningfull in you mobile app, as long as they no longer change once
> defined.
>
> I think this is the best solution at the moment having in mind time and
complexity limitations stated above. And this is what Ngewi actually come
up with. Moreover, once account is matched every subsequent transaction
imports from the same account will be recognized by GnuCash and matched
automatically.


> You use QIF in which case for a goood experience you'll probably need to:
> * Extend the format (and importer)  to add a transaction identifier,
> otherwise
> you are going to have a real painfull user experience.
>
> Extending QIF or maybe even introducing own format (not sure if extending
QIF is much easier) is a good long term idea. After all, Gnucash mobile is
not a generic expense tracker and it should care only about proper data
transfer between Gnucash mobile and desktop app. That is we can come up
with any format that meets our requirements for reliability and friendly
user software interaction. This feature would require a proper import
format design, modifications to the parser and importer (or new parser and
importer), probably modifications to the data model, new exporter for
mobile application. I don't see it accomplished within 5 weeks.

Cheers,
Muslim Chochlov