Chart with option or separate reports

[Carsten Rinke]

Hi there,

just to let you know I am still alive :-)

Regarding: "Apparently these two were forgotten."
Actually, I noticed that there two ways of how reports had been 
implemented, with e.g. Net Worth belonging to a more generic but also 
more complex implementation than the others - do not remember the 
details anymore.

My conclusion was, that a merge would be best, but it requires more 
detailed understanding of the report system. I tried to get deeper into 
this over the year, especially as I have an itch with the multi-column 
report that is able to display the wrong reports, but failed to make 
time for this due to my professional life :-(
Not sure, when I can continue ... but I keep this on my todo-list.

If you have time and ideas around this, you are more than welcome to 
overtake :-)

Kind regards,
Carsten

On 02.12.2016 13:27, Geert Janssens wrote:
> Op vrijdag 2 december 2016 10:21:54 CET schreef Robert Fewell:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just looking at making the chart reports more consistent
> Good!
>
>> and noticed that
>> some have an option to select line or bar chart while 'Net Worth' and
>> 'Income & Expenses' have separate reports.
>>
>> Should these be changed to an option ?
> Yes, that would be a good thing. This work was started by Carsten Rinke some
> time ago. Apparently these two were forgotten.
>
>> If so, am I correct that each new combined report would require a new guid,
>> the old reports deleted and as the report version has been updated will not
>> cause concern.
> That's only half of the story...
> Imagine you are a user happily using gnucash 2.6 and you have several saved
> report configurations based on one of the above mentioned reports. In addition
> at least one report is still open in a tab.
>
> Now you migrate to 2.8. What do you want to see happen as that user ? Well
> nothing. Everything should just continue to work as before. That is of course
> the ideal situation and not always achievable. But let's see how close we can
> get...
>
> You didn't specify what you intended to do with the old reports. I assume
> you'd want to remove them as they have been superseded by your new reports.
>
> That would mean the user loses both his saved reports and the open report
> tabs.
>
> So, to deal with this I  would
> 1. choose the post popular variant (which is either line or bar - a poll or
> query on gnucash-user/gnucash-devel should give an idea) and amend that report
> to also handle the other variant. So it would get the additional option,
> defaulting to whichever was there originally. Don't change the report guid.
> => This would ensure that at least for the most popular variant the saved and
> open reports just continue to work.
>
> 2. For the other variant, remove it from the reports menu, but internally keep
> the report definition. Instead of a fully fledged report the code for this
> other variant should just load the first variant with the additional, new
> report option set. There are other examples of this in the reports code.
> => This would ensure the other saved and open reports continue to load. If
> done properly they will be converted transparently in the new report format.
>
> Finally, the version bump on saved-reports will prevent the new option from
> ever appearing in the older saved-reports file for 2.6 and earlier.
>
> The only thing we can't reasonably avoid is going back to gnucash 2.6 with a
> new style report still open when leaving gnucash 2.8. In this case the most
> popular variant from point 1 will appear in all situations, because the new
> option isn't known in 2.6. Theoretically we could handle this as well by
> defining the option in the non-gui parts of 2.6 already and redirect the
> report if the option turns out to be set. IMO that would lead too far though.
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert
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