Online banking

[Paul Tirk]

Dear Christian,

I understand your point, but I am not actually trying to scrape a 
webpage but rather using an existing API of the bank to return the 
transactions in JSON format.

In a perfect world, there would be a global standard for everyone but 
unfortunately in Europe banks and financial institutions seem not to be 
interested to provide such a interface for the end user (except HBCI in 
Germany, in Austria the discussion about this is already going on for at 
least 10 years and it seems impossible to get closer to a solution). 
Instead I have the impression that they are trying to abandon all 
efforts on this and force the user/client to use their proprietary 
programs/interfaces.

But as John pointed out, I will have a look at the import-export source 
and create a plugin for that, maybe it can be useful to others later.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Paul



Am 28.09.2015 08:40, schrieb Christian Stimming:
> Dear Paul,
> 
> I don't think it is possible or useful to think of "yet another generic 
> API".
> Instead, I would suggest the API of aqbanking is indeed the 4th or 5th
> iteration on building an API from the application to online banking 
> functions.
> Also, I would strongly suggest against programming a website scraper - 
> it will
> give you very little gain for very large effort. If your bank doesn't 
> have
> anything else besides a website, in fact the easiest solution is to 
> find a
> different bank that has some standard protocol such as OFX. Sorry for 
> that.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Christian
> 
> Am Montag, 28. September 2015, 00:24:02 schrieb Paul Tirk:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> no, I know that it's not a website scraper but in fact I want to 
>> program
>> one ;) And I assume the developer of AqBanking will not just add any 
>> set
>> of api-calls/https-requests for every other bank to his library.
>> 
>> So I was thinking about a generic interface in Gnucash to simplify
>> things because I also think it would be beneficial for future
>> development to not depend completely and only on AqBanking like it is
>> now because it seems that (at least in Europe) the trend is going away
>> from standards (except HBCI in Germany) towards bank-specific APIs 
>> (most
>> of them are https-requests sent).
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Paul
>> 
>> Am 27.09.2015 20:55, schrieb Derek Atkins:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Yes, the GnuCash AqB backend is tied to AqB.  However...
>> >
>> > AqBanking is licensed under the GPL, and already has multiple modules
>> > that
>> > implement HBCI, OFX, OFX-DC, MT940, CSV, ...
>> >
>> > So, why do you feel that you couldn't add a new module to that?
>> >
>> > Do you know what online banking protocol your bank supports?  Or do you
>> > have the mistaken impression that it's a website scraper?
>> >
>> > -derek
>> >
>> > On Sun, September 27, 2015 2:23 pm, Paul Tirk wrote:
>> >> Hello!
>> >>
>> >> I was thinking about adding online banking support for a bank which
>> >> has
>> >> no HBCI (and is not supported by AqBanking). After some time browsing
>> >> the source of gnucash and AqBanking I realized that the online banking
>> >> functionality of gnucash is tightly coupled to AqBanking which in turn
>> >> has a restricted license and it actually doesn't look easy to add
>> >> different banks.
>> >>
>> >> Are there plans on a clean online banking API in gnucash which could
>> >> enable developers to include different banking protocols? If not I
>> >> would
>> >> be interested in contributing but I have no idea where to start. Could
>> >> somebody maybe give me a hint about this?
>> >>
>> >> My idea would be: the current menu entries for online banking are
>> >> fine,
>> >> it would just need a general user/account setup which could allow the
>> >> current AqBanking accounts as well as other "plugins/modules" which
>> >> can
>> >> then be triggered as it is working right now with only AqBanking.
>> >>
>> >> I hope I made myself clear and thanks in advance,
>> >>
>> >> Paul
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> gnucash-devel mailing list
>> >> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>> >> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>> 
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