Peanut gallery comment. Was: Gnucash reports

[Derek Atkins]

Allen,

"Allen S. Rout" <asr at ufl.edu> writes:

[snip]
> Simplest:  "Fire a report from the command line".  Absolute minimum data
> from the command line, no need to be able to tweak all the details.
> Customer ID, target filename and that's it
>
> gnucash --run-customer-report="report-name"
> --output-filename="/path/file.html"  --customer-id="000003"
>
> If you want fancy specialness, define a customized report in the
> interactive GUI, and refer to it by name.

This is an extremely report-specific command-line.  I think if we DID do
something like this we would want to make it generic, to work with any
report.  Something like:

  gnucash --run-report="Customer Report"
      --report-output="/path/to/file.html"
      --report-options="customer-id=000003"

But designing the interface to be generic is a lot of work.

> Next simplest:  "Run this report for all [active] customers"
>
> --output-dir="/path/dir/"
>
> and then you'd wind up with
>
> 000003.html
> 000005.html
>
> etc.

Again, not very simple, would create tons of extraneous output, and VERY
specific to a particular report.

> I find the gnucash engine fairly comfortable, but coming out of
> GNUspace, it makes me twitch that it's so very difficult to modify or
> automate the operations of the engine.  I want to get to the point at
> which I can help change that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "GNUspace".  but fair enough about the
difficulty of automating operations; it's been a long-standing request
to have a command-line interface to at least some operations.  Just
remember, however, that whatever gets implemented should be generic, not
specific, because the next person is going to come along and suggest
that they want a different report, or different options, or different
settings that they want to set.

> - Allen S. Rout

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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