cmd line: import of transactions and invoice data

[John Ralls]

On Dec 31, 2013, at 8:03 AM, Jannick <jannick.news at gmail.com> wrote:

> Geert Janssens <janssens-geert <at> telenet.be> writes:
> 
>> 
>> On Tuesday 31 December 2013 10:34:41 Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> On Tue, December 31, 2013 9:59 am, Jannick wrote:
>>>> I am currently looking into using gnucash on a command line basis.
>>>> Are there
>>>> - if any - command line instructions to import (1) transactions and
>>>> (2) invoice data (example file shipped with the latest 29.12.2013
>>>> version).
>>>> 
>>>> Many thanks and have a great 2014!
>>>> J.
>>> 
>>> Sorry, no.  GnuCash is a GUI tool.  There is no command line
>>> interface.
>>> 
>>> -derek
>> 
>> to add to this, if your gnucash version has been compiled with python
> support, you could write 
>> python scripts to do this for you on the command line. There is
> unfortunately not much 
>> documentation on this feature. The example scripts that come with the
> python bindings may 
>> be a good start.
>> 
>> Geert
>> 
> 
> Thx for the quick replies! Hmm, too bad. But, Geert, picking up your idea -
> given that I am not good at compilation and at python - is the python
> support shipped with Win complilation?
> 
> Coming from another (back-)end: Do you know if someone has gone down the
> implementation route to import data into the MySQL db? Or - more generally -
> if some app can cope with adding/changing transactions in the MySQL db?
> 
> I am just racking my brain how to automatically import data (coming from
> different sources: hbci, invoice overviews, non-hbci bank transactions etc)
> to use all the good features coming with gnucash.
> 

There's also the Guile/Scheme interface, which is actually a bit more comprehensive,
because parts of GnuCash are written in it, and those parts are of course accessible
from Scheme. Python only wraps the C functions.

No, the Win32 package isn't built with Python support.

Someone with deep knowledge of GnuCash's internals *could* write code that would
directly import transactions into a SQL database, but having that deep knowledge
would mean that he would be able to do the same via GnuCash's C or Scheme API
with less effort.

GnuCash has importers for QIF, OFX, HBCI, and CSV formats, it just lacks a command-line
interface for operating them.

A further warning: You're implying rather large-scale import operations, and I wonder
if perhaps your needs might exceed GnuCash's ability to scale. In spite of SourceForge's
recent inclusion of GnuCash in their "Enterprise Marketplace", GnuCash isn't an
enterprise-scale program.

Regards,
John Ralls