Online banking

[Bob Gustafson]

I would second that recommendation.

A web scraper solution is captive to any random changes that the bank 
makes to its website - incurring a need to work on your parser before it 
'works' again.

Changes to bank web sites seem to come at the worst possible moment in 
terms of your own (developer) workload.

Even if a bank allows transaction downloads in various different formats 
(MT940, CSV(??),CAMT,..) the standards of individual banks and 
individual accounts can change over time (character set, whether to use 
UE or u-umlaut, all upper case vs upper/lower). Misspelling of names and 
other user-entered data is sometimes an unavoidable complication.

Data input is a complicated  game.

Have fun

Bob G

On 09/28/2015 01:40 AM, Christian Stimming wrote:
> 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
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