[GNC-dev] GnuCash 3 on Linux

[Geert Janssens]

Op zondag 24 februari 2019 05:05:21 CET schreef David Cousens:
> Adrien,
> 
> You beat me to it. I was about to also suggest making it a user preference
> to be able to store the report configurations either with the book or as a
> user location. Then the user could choose what suits their circumstances and
> configuration.
> 
> David Cousens

Well, for me each reference to "a new user preference" triggers the question 
"can't we solve it in another way".

For starters the user preference is an all or nothing thing, either all 
reports are in a book or in a common location. That's not very fine-grained. 
Perhaps you consider some reports common and some reports book-specific. This 
could be solved by making it a per report option of course.

It also doesn't solve the issue of sharing those common reports with other 
users (like your accountant).

And yet another issue: reports are only suitable for multiple books if these 
books have the exact same base as required per report. An example to clarify 
what I mean: take the transaction report. The user selects a set of 
transactions to display. Now suppose you select some accounts that are 
exclusively to this particular book. If you save this preset, and use it in 
another book that doesn't have these accounts there will be an issue. I 
haven't tested, though at best the account is ignored, at worst the report 
throws errors. That's the best scenario. The other way around is worse: 
suppose you saved the report configuration with all asset accounts selected in 
one book. You then try to use this report on a  book that has an additional 
asset account. As this account is not part of the initial selection it won't 
appear in the transaction report in the second book. Of course for a 
transaction report it's fairly easy to spot. There are other reports where 
this is much more subtle though. And this is not limited to account selections 
though I suspect that's the most important one.

So my conclusion is that report configurations are essentially book specific 
and should be treated as such to avoid unexpected accounting mistakes.

On the other hand I understand it takes time to carefully configure reports to 
your preference and there's a wish to reuse this effort across books.

I have done this thought exercise in the past. At that time the best I could 
come up with was to provide gui functions to manage report presets. In 
particular some form of import/export functionality. The configurations would 
remain per book. But one could explicitly export a configuration from one book 
and import it in another.

It's not ideal as it doesn't solve the subtle errors issue. The user will 
still have to verify the imported configuration works for the book it's 
imported in. Improving on that will require smarter report options (like ways 
to specify "select all asset accounts" or "select all children from account 
xyz" instead of a dumb list of account ids). I'm pretty sure that would 
increase internal option complexity a lot and I'm not convinced the benefit in 
this case is worth the trouble.

All brainstorming of course. No implementation in sight...

Regards,

Geert