New Account Dialog

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 2:59 PM, Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 11:25:11 +0500
>> From: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
>> To: GnuCash-Devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
>> Subject: New Account Dialog
>> Message-ID: <A5DC8715-29E5-4BF7-8ACF-C3B283C67EE7 at yahoo.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> In recent weeks, there have been a number of threads on the user list in
>> which users have had difficulties setting up accounts for equities and
> mutual
>> funds. These users have not been able to set the Security/Currency to an
>> appropriate value because the account type was not correctly set.
>> 
>> I believe that the New Account dialog contributes to this problem by the
> way
>> it is set up. The sequence of fields in the dialog does not match the
> required
>> sequence of input; the user must correctly set the Account Type field
>> (located at the bottom of the dialog) *BEFORE* they can correctly set the
>> Security/currency field.
>> 
>> Not only is this sequence confusing to new users, it is an annoyance for
>> experienced users as well, since the user must manually relocate to the
> type
>> field, set the type, and then manually relocate back to the currency field
> to
>> set it. This quickly gets burdensome.
>> 
>> At the very least, I would suggest that it would be much clearer and
> easier to
>> all users to have the Account Type field placed immediately after the
>> Description field, and that it be changed to a drop down list. This would
> make
>> it clearer to new users and more efficient for others, without entailing a
> great
>> deal of change to the program.
>> 
>> I can add a bug to bugzilla if it seems that this would be useful.
>> 
>> David
>> ------------------------------
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 05:12:24 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com  <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
>> To: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>> Subject: Re: New Account Dialog
>> Message-ID: <000f425b.622dff6752aa1a4f at gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="utf-8"
>> 
>>    Related to this issue, I think that it is not very clear that there
> are accounts,
>> currencies and commodities (or securities) in the data and that investment
>> accounts require a unioue combination of all three items.
>> There can be (in fact must be )many security accounts for the same
> security if
>> they are under different broker accounts or in different currencies.
>> Then the price table defines the relationship over time of these items. ?
>> Please excuse the sloppy editing. ?I am doing this on a tablet.
>> 
>> David C
>> Sent from my LG G Pad 7.0 LTE, an AT&T 4G LTE tablet
>> ------------------------------
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 06:35:04 -0700
>> From: John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>
>> To: david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
>> Cc: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>> Subject: Re: New Account Dialog
>> Message-ID: <D23B4BBC-EC8C-4D03-8870-0DD847D5DD5E at ceridwen.us>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>> 
>>> On Jul 27, 2016, at 5:12 AM, david.carlson.417 at gmail.com wrote:
>> David,
>> 
>> I think that that's quite well explained in Chapter 8 of the guide, and
> the new
>> user's problems are largely down to not reading the documentation before
>> diving in.
>> 
>> I agree with to your proposed change to the UI for 2.8, and it should be
> as
>> you say fairly simple, probably only a Glade change with no code. Please
> do
>> file a bug so that we remember to do it.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> 
> Hi David T, David C & John,
> 
> I started working yesterday on improving the guide documentation for this,
> just to be clearer that you need to select the account type before trying to
> select the security. I spent a couple of hours looking for an appropriate
> bug, which I thought already existed, but only found
> 
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115461  - Stock Account should
> not allow Currency Comodities
> 
> I think I will continue to update the documentation, even though hopefully
> somebody will fix this soon, as I guess the fix won't be live until 2.8.
> 
> David C,
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by:
> 
>> Related to this issue, I think that it is not very clear that there are
> accounts,
>> currencies and commodities (or securities) in the data and that investment
>> accounts require a unique combination of all three items.
> 
> If you could elucidate I'll try to include in my documentation change?
> 
> John,
> 
> Is there an email list of people who get mail whenever a new bug is raised?
> If so, can I get on that list please?

Chris,

Not exactly a list. Here's how it works: There are a set of dummy email accounts for different components, and they're set as the "default assignee" and "default QA contact". The list is:
gnucash-core-maint at gnome.bugs: All components except the ones below
gnucash-documentation-maint at gnome.bugs: Documentation, Translations, Website
gnucash-general-maint at gnome.bugs: General
gnucash-import-maint at gnome.bugs: Import-*, TXF Export
gnucash-mac-maint at gnome.bugs: MacOSX
gnucash-reports-maint at gnome.bugs: Check Printing, Reports
gnucash-ui-maint at gnome.bugs: Regist2, Register, User Interface General
gnucash-win-maint at gnome.bugs: Windows

If you log in to Bugzilla and click on the "Preferences" link at the top of the page, then the Email Preferences tab, you'll find a section called "User Watching" and a box in which you can add a comma-separated list of addresses, then click the "submit changes" button, and you'll start getting notifications of every change to every bug in the components associated with the addresses you follow.

Regards,
John Ralls