Peanut gallery comment. Was: Gnucash reports

[Buddha Buck]

I would be happy with the reports, including report options, being
available via Python bindings, or even Guile bindings.  It may be easier to
make that interface generic than a command-line based one.  In which case,
the particular command-line reporting Mr. Rout is looking for could be
easily written as a custom Python script.

I'll admit that being able to get customer reports via command line would
be very handy for me and my hackerspace as well.



On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> 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
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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