GnuCash and a PHP web application

Josh Sled jsled at asynchronous.org
Thu Dec 30 19:27:40 EST 2004


On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 18:38, Tom Haskins-Vaughan wrote:

> I'm currently developing an application in PHP/MySQL which will have 
> certain financial functionality. Is it possible to interact with the 
> 'gnucash database' from something like PHP so that I don't have to enter 
> the daily takikngs summary twice?

In short: no.

The gnucash codebase takes care to distinguish the "engine" from the app
and gui front-end ... for the most-part.  Unfortunately, there is a lot
of not-gui-specific "business logic" in the GUI layer.


You could create a PHP 'module' -- I don't know what the term is
specifically -- which wraps the existing gnucash engine API, thus
exposing those libraries to your PHP script.

Note that the engine assume that _it_ controls the DB [an XML file,
really], and thus it would probably be at-odds with your MySQL
database...

There _is_ a database backend to gnucash, but
a/ it's intended for postgres, not mysql.
b/ it doesn't support the full range of application objects -- 
  specifically: business objects and scheduled transactions.

SWIG could be employed to help manage wrapping the API for PHP;
currentely our SWIG support is non-existent.

...jsled

-- 
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`


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