Importing data from custom software

[Nicolas Marchildon]

Some years ago, I wrote a basic PHP interface over a simple MySQL database, 
for managing my expenses. This has satisfied my needs for a long time, but I 
now realized it was getting complex, and I needed real accounting. I found 
GnuCash, and gave it a short try, and read lots of documentation, and even 
some source code.

Now that I've made my decision to move to GnuCash, I need a way to transfer 
all my previous data, without having to re-enter it by hand, which would take 
me many weeks, in my opinion.

To my knowledgde, GnuCash only imports one or two file formats, where the 
most used is the QIF format. Therefore, I'm thinking of generating one or 
many QIF files out of MySQL. An alternative, which seems that it would take 
me much more time, is to build a simple "plugin" that would access the Engine 
and add transactions.

So, I'm currently planning to generate QIF files, but I have little knowledge 
of them, for now. I'm wondering if anybody ever wrote a C of Java module 
having the same data structure as QIF files, that would allow me to simply 
call some methods, and call a dump() or generate() method to get a QIF file 
at the end, without having to care much about its format.

I've also thought of setting up GnuCash with a PostgreSQL backend, and 
writing a simple script to transfer from MySQL to PostgreSQL, but I don't 
know whether I'd be able to transfer the PostgreSQL data back into the 
regular XML format GnuCash uses.

So, I'd like to have some opinions on which way would be the easiest, or 
which one would give the community reusable tools. From a point of view, 
writing a QIF-generator API seems to be generic enough to interest more 
people than me alone ;)

Regards,

Nicolas Marchildon