Using OFX support

Conrad Canterford conrad at mail.watersprite.com.au
Thu Mar 13 01:00:25 CST 2003


On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 16:37, Steve Cooper wrote:
> A quick scan of the documentation only showed how to find the file
> import menu item for .OFX files.  Do I have to manually download the
> file?  If so, I don't know exactly how to find it online.  My bank is
> First Tech (www.1sttech.com).  They definitely implement OFX, but only
> provide links for QIF file download.

And sadly, this is exactly the reason why (at this stage) gnucash is
unable to load these files directly. You see, the exact format of the
url and other information is some proprietary thing which M$ and Intuit
have organised with the bank, and gnucash has no way of getting access
to that. 

You can try suggesting to your bank that they put links to the OFX files
on the same page as the QIF download. Yeah, I know, that's not going to
get it changed, but if enough people start asking, they might realise
that they're irritating their customers by not providing it.

As a fall-back, you do realise that gnucash can import QIF files don't
you? Not as nice as OFX, but it does generaslly work.

> A proxy logged the following activity when MS Money downloaded bank
> transactions (timestamps deleted).
> CONNECT   Connect (file descriptor 10): localhost [127.0.0.1]
> CONNECT   Request (file descriptor 10): CONNECT ofx.1sttech.com:443 HTTP/1.0
> CONNECT   Established connection to host "ofx.1sttech.com" using file descriptor 11.
> INFO      Not sending client headers to remote machine
> INFO      Closed connection between local client (fd:10) and remote client (fd:11)
> I experimented with http://ofx.1sttech.com:43 in mozilla.  It
> downloaded a binary file called m2ohhivc.bin.  But I'm at a loss what
> to do from here.

I'm not sure if that file will be of any use. Maybe Benoit or someone
will want to have a look at  it?

> How can I find where the OFX file lives?  Or even better, how can I
> coax gnucash into using the URL to access the OFX data directly using
> the OFX protocol?  Or am I missing something?

The OFX library doesn't actually support that yet, either, but I believe
its being worked on (or is relatively high on the to-do list for being
worked on). 

> I'm on a Debian system running gnucash 1.8.2.  I am using the unstable
> binary package, rather than building from source.  I assume if the OFX
> menu item is present that OFX support is compiled in?

Correct.

Conrad.
> -- 
> Conrad Canterford  (conrad at mail.watersprite.com.au)
> Water Sprite Pty Ltd   |  url - http://www.watersprite.com.au/
> GPO Box 355,           |  - Australian Tour and Event Management (ATEM)
> Canberra, ACT 2601     |  - Ticketing Division.
> Mobile: +61 402 697054 |  - Catering Services Division.



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list