OFX Support

Benoit Grégoire bock@step.polymtl.ca
Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:24:09 -0500


On December 10, 2002 11:53 am, Kevin Cramer wrote:
> I went to my bank's website and I found that it offers the choice of
> downloading your transaction to Quicken, Money, and in QIF.  The
> Quicken file was a file with a QFX extension and the Money file had an
> OFX extension so I imagine these things are close to what I need.

Both should work.  You probably wan't the Money one, which may have less 
proprietary tags, but it shouldn't matter.

> I tried to run the 2 files through ofxdump and both had nothing but
> errors.  However, I did look and my openjade is only at 1.3.1.  I'm
> running Gentoo and there isn't a package for 1.3.4 in the stable
> branch but I will try to upgrade and see if it works.

Be carefull, it may have worked, ofxdump is a debug tool ans is very verbose 
in default mode.  If you get meaningfull data at the end, it worked.

> Here is what is at the top of both files.  It looks like OFX to me but
> I wanted to check since I didn't expect the non-marked up text at the
> top.  Removing it and re-running ofxdump didn't change anything,
> though.  Either the OpenSP is the culprit or my bank doesn't provide
> proper OFX.
>
> OFXHEADER:100
> DATA:OFXSGML
> VERSION:102
> SECURITY:NONE
> ENCODING:USASCII
> CHARSET:1252
> COMPRESSION:NONE
> OLDFILEUID:NONE
> NEWFILEUID:NONE
>
> <OFX>
> <SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
> <SONRS>
> <STATUS>
> <CODE>0

This is perfectly valid OFX, it should work.

> One last question, as I understand it the direct bill pay feature
> isn't not in libofx.  Is that something I should expect in the future?
> I've also thought about using the bill pay through their website and
> using GnuCash.  It will be a little more work than just entering bills
> in Quicken and it handles the payment but it will get me off of
> Quicken and using GnuCash!

Direct bill pay requires a direct connection.  Work on that will begin in 
LibOFX once I find a way to get to the bank's OFX server ip address, meaning 
after direct download is supported.  However, I suppose there is also much UI 
work to be done inside Gnucash for bill pay support. 

-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/