Import files

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 10:27:50PM +0100, lmb was heard to remark:
> On 2001-10-30T15:20:10,
>    Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org> said:
> 
> > > In the same vain, has anyone looked at adding HBCI support to gnucash for
> > > direct support of German (and other countries too?) home banking? How much
> > > effort would that be?
> > Well, I think the gnucash programming interface is fairly clean -- you 
> > create a transaction, set the date, set the amount, etc.  So the only
> > hard part is to open, read & parse your favorite format. 
> 
> Well, HBCI is much more than that.

Hey, you said 'import', not me.

> It allows one to do all you would want to do; ask the bank for account
> information, transactions, do money transfers, request new forms, whatever, in
> a standarized and open way; however, the specification is still pretty
> complicated, 

Adding GUI's for all this stuff could be a gooey mess. That's the hard
part.  But queriying the balance and/or recent transactions should be 
fairly straightfoward.

> the connection requires encryption/signatures via a chipcard et
> all.

encryption is *easy*, we got libraries that do all that.  Having
card-reader device drivers is a whole nother question; that's a linux
kernel thing.

> Though initally, I would be quite happy if it just did download the
> transactions from my bank and import that... ;-)
> 
> While the good and proper implementation would be to go with HBCI, I fear the
> easy and tempting way is a set of perl scripts to automate the https dialogue
> and write the parsed HTML out to gnucash readable files. *grin*

right.

> Though should anyone be interested in HBCI, the specs are available from
> www.hbci-zka.de, also in English.

since hbci is available only in germany, I presume that a german would
be writing the code to interface to it ...

> Anyway, gnucash is pretty awesome already; I am looking forward to work on it.
> (Damn temptation - I mean, work _with_ it; I don't need yet another project,
> really, I won't!)

sure you do ...


--linas

-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933