Insert Customer modifying/build Gnucash file

[Neil Williams]

On Saturday 30 October 2004 6:32 am, Antonio Laterza wrote:
> > If the unasked question was "can I do this?" the answer is "yes, but."
> > Yes, you can do that, but it's not supported and we don't guarantee
> > that you'll be able to do so in the future.  Nor we guarantee that
> > your resulting data file with actually work.
> >
> > On the other hand, once Neil finishes his BookMerge code you'll be
> > able to create an XML file with the objects you want to add into your
> > gnucash data file and just merge them in.

Work is ongoing, I'm hoping to get the next druid running next week - it 
should allow existing books to be merged and that will naturally lead into a 
third druid that will load partial book information from an XML format, such 
as that to be created by future pilot-link code.

> > -derek
>
> Sorry the question is:
>
> What is the risks and what I have to pay attention?

The risks are clear: your GnuCash file is likely to be corrupted (see other 
thread, started by Kevin), either so that it can never be loaded again or 
that if it does load it will never show the correct data again. You can 
easily lose transactions, splits and entire accounts, leading to a set of 
GnuCash accounts that are impossible to balance.

Always have a backup. (You'll need a backup when my code is used too - these 
merge operations cannot be undone.)

> Can You point me to documentation that can help to format correctly the
> file?

The file format isn't documented because it's not (at the moment) accessible 
or modifiable outside the program.

I'm looking at a reduced format for partial books, like single invoices and 
customer lists or recent transactions for a particular account or data from 
external program like pilot-link, as well as merging complete books covering 
years of data from genuine GnuCash sources.

> What are the constraint? 

Lots of constraints exist. Most involve the GUID and relationships between 
objects like which transaction belongs to which account and contains which 
splits.

If it was anywhere near as easy as you and Kevin (from the other thread) had 
hoped, my book merge code would have been finished months ago.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
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