Transaction Posted Time

[Christian Stimming]

Am Sonntag, 19. Juni 2016, 11:31:39 schrieb John Ralls:
> Bug 767824[1] has me thinking about this again. As I think everyone knows I
> want to change it from midnight local to 11:00AM UTC for the next version,
> but since fixing this bug also requires a scrub function at file read time
> to correct the (probably few) files with borked timestamps I'm thinking of
> doing it now.

Thanks for the info. In fact I didn't recognize your idea to change the posted 
date's time-of-day. 

Did you review bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137017 for this? 
My take is that the "posted date" should be changed into a data type that 
doesn't have any time-of-day anymore. As long as this is not the case, we will 
IMHO always run into troubles. 

At the time bug 137017 was discussed in 2010, I decided to add the additional 
KVP slot for posted date with data type GDate. Hence, since 2010 every 
transaction has the regular posted-date timestamp (date plus time-of-day) plus 
additionally a KVP slot with the posted-date (date only), where the kvp slot's 
value will for sure contain the date value that was entered by the user, 
regardless of the time zone the program was in at the time of entering.

When you have to think about a scrub function, this additional data field 
might become handy.

However, some cases where the posted-date's time-of-day is chosen differently 
are known: 
- imported transactions that contained a time-of-day will have that time 
written in here, such as those transactions that came from an OFX file that 
was created by gnucash-on-android.
- book closing transactions contain some other time-of-day here
- other cases might exist, too.

Hence, unfortunately there are still multiple use cases of the time-of-day 
part of the posted-date. Any scrub functions that tries to map this time-of-
day to another one, or also a final scrub function that tries to map this to a 
fixed day-only data type, will have to take all those special cases into 
account. Unfortunately.

Again, I would suggest to switch the posted-date data type to a date-only 
(without time) as soon as possible, as discussed in bug 137017 and various 
discussions throughout the years.

Regards,

Christian