Customer vs Company

[Derek Atkins]

plussier at mindspring.com writes:

> What about it is challenging?  Rewriting the existing mechanism by 
> which Gnucash stores address information, or getting it to query an 
> LDAP server?

I think the challenge is both the interfacing to LDAP as well as
the user choice to determine where to lookup the data.

Right now, *ALL* data is stored in XML; there is nothing special
about the contact database.  Changing that would be a challenge.

> The query part shouldn't be too difficult.  Rewriting the address 
> storage mechanism might be hairy, since you then need to provide 
> options for people so they can choose to use LDAP or not.

Exactly.

> I merely see LDAP as a convenient mechanism to share directory
> information with other LDAP aware applications.  It by no means
> should be a requirement for using GnuCash, especially since most
> GnuCash users seem to be individuals, and LDAP is more a feature
> I expect would  only be interesting to small companies which
> already use LDAP for other things.
> 
> Where in the code is the customer address stuff?  I don't know the 
> first thing about scheme, and won't even pretend to be able to 
> contribute code, but I wouldn't mind mucking around with this a 
> little to see what I can learn/come up with.
> ( I might be able to contribute something in perl :)

No, the code is all in C.  See src/business/business-core (and the
'file' subdirectory, which contains the XML I/O routines).

-derek

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> Paul
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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