change in date format in 2.7

[John Ralls]

Alen,

Oh yeah, SQLite3. That doesn’t have a date type so the backend stores a formatted string. We use ISO formatted date output for a lot of other things and I didn’t see a good reason to write a special output function just for the SQLite3 backend when I rewrote the SQL backend in C++.

We consider the data file formats and SQL schemas to be private implementation details.  If we make a change that breaks Piecash, too bad. I told Sébastien that repeatedly and at length three years ago when he embarked on the project.

The desired state at this time is that you work on improving the GnuCash python bindings and use those.

Regards,
John Ralls 

> \On Dec 20, 2017, at 12:37 PM, Alen Siljak <alen.siljak at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
>   John,
> 
>   With 2.7.2, the datetime field in sqlite3 database has increased to 19
>   chars, as Sebastien reported. The new format is yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:ss
>   instead of yyyymmddHHMMss.
>   It appears that the application can read both formats in a book and
>   that part is not a problem.
> 
>   However, we are trying to set up the piecash library to utilize either
>   one or both formats (if possible with SQLAlchemy data layer to use both
>   patterns for conversion to Python datetime type).
>   Now that you say this was not intentional, I'd like to know what is the
>   desired state at this time. I have updated almost all my date columns
>   to the new format so that I could continue using gnucash_portfolio set
>   of functions and reports, which use the piecash data model underneath
>   and still read my book file after upgrade to 2.7.2.
> 
>   Any clarifications are welcome! :)
> 
>   Cheers,
>   Alen
>>> On Dec 20, 2017, at 4:38 AM, Sébastien de Menten <sdementen at gmail.com <http://gmail.com/>> wro
> te:
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> In books created in gnucash 2.7, the size of the field for date has been
>>> increased from 14 to 19 characters to move from a custom format to an ISO
>>> format if I understand properly.
>>> 
>>> This is a backward incompatible change, correct ?
>>> ie GC 2.7 will read previous books and "migrate" them to the new format but
>>> then the books will not be readable by GC < 2.7.
>> 
>> Uh, what file format do you mean? The only intentional change was to MySQL wher
> e we replaced TIMESTAMP >with DATETIME, but that appeared during testing to be t
> ransparent.
>> 
>> But otherwise, no, it’s not necessarily incompatible as long as the date parser
> can understand the input >it will work either way. Did you test and find that s
> ome 2.6.x was unable to read a 2.7.2 file or database?
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
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