[GNC-dev] Feedback on GnuCash 3.903

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Fri Jun 5 13:26:44 EDT 2020


Op vrijdag 5 juni 2020 16:05:36 CEST schreef D via gnucash-devel:
> Bob,
> 
> I still don't understand fully. Are you saying that if I set my column
> widths differently for Stock A and Stock B, and then close both and reopen
> them both, that they will open with a set of arbitrarily-defined default
> widths for that account type, rather than the account-specific settings I'd
> chosen previously?

As long as you don't record a default for stock type registers, yes. It will make a best effort to 
reuse what you had set before, but we will no longer store column widths per account. You will 
have to set one per register type.

> 
> If that is so, I'd say that the decision that "was made" was a bad one.
> 

No change is made lightly. A lot of thought has gone into this, though I understand the end 
result is less convenient for your specific use case.

> To take one example, my mortgage and my credit card are both liability
> accounts. The balances in the two accounts are going to be significantly
> different, however, and I'd prefer to have different widths for the balance
> column. It sounds like I'd be out of luck in this new regime, yes?
> 
> I'm not clear what benefit this provides on the back end. Could you explain
> these reasons more clearly?


The different register types referred to here are not Assets, Liabilities, Income, Expense and 
Equity. This refers to the different formats in which registers can present information.

The most simple register is any register that displays a single currency ordinary account. These 
registers only show a debit and a credit column for values. It should be relatively 
straightforward to size the columns in any of these registers to work well for most others of this 
same kind.

Then you have stock accounts which additionally have a price/shares column. It wouldn't make 
sense to reuse column widths from the basic register representation as there are more columns 
to show so likely you'd want different settings for those.

The business registers (AR and AP) again have a different column arrangement. Again column 
widths of the other registers would not map very well, so it will have its own set of defaults.

The motivation for this change is exactly as Michael described: we have had several complaints 
that it was cumbersome to have to change column widths each time again for each account 
opened for the first time.

We did consider a three level approach:
1. if the user has manipulated column widths for a specific account register, store this for that 
account
2. to avoid having to fix each and every register opened for the first time, allow setting a 
sensible default per register type (which is defined by which columns are in the register not by 
it's accounting meaning).
3. in the absence of either, calculate defaults.

This quickly became too complicated to maintain a good user experience. While thinking about 
this plenty of corner cases came up that would either be confusing or cumbersome for the user.

With that in mind and given our limited development resources we have chosen for the middle 
ground solution: let the user only set defaults for each different register layout we have and no 
longer per account opened. The assumption is that for accounts that display the same columns 
it should be possible to set column widths that fit most of the accounts using that layout.

If you have specific accounts that don't fit the chosen register we have kept the option to resize 
columns for that and keep those around as long as the account is left open in a tab. 

It will need a one time action to set these new defaults once you start using 4.0. I believe we 
have 6 layouts so that's 6 times you may see a layout that doesn't suit you and you would have 
to fix it.

Regards,

Geert


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