FreeCoins and gnuCash revisited

[Neil Williams]

On Thursday 02 September 2004 8:20, David J Patrick wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 16:18, Neil Williams wrote:
> > I'm more than willing to take a look - I did send an email about
> > FreeCoins some weeks ago

Please CC the gnucash list on all replies.

> Amazing !

Not really, however, I have yet to hear a reply or see any activity on the 
SourceForge news pages, mailing list or CVS commits.

I also can't get the freecoins code to produce documentation with recent 
versions of xmlto.

I may yet abandon freecoins and do it all via pilot-link and a C program 
running on the host machine, not the PDA. That program would be a fairly 
simple enhancement of an existing qof_book_merge example. However, I won't 
have time to develop it any time soon.

> > QIF (IIRC) won't/doesn't work well with business objects, if FreeCoins
> > can talk to a conduit (e.g. in pilot-link) or directly in XML, it could
> > generate suitable files for GnuCash to merge as QofBook structures.
>
> there exists this freecoins2xml thingie..
> IMHO, if you and Vlad (diz) Mereuta (freecoins) and lars_c_persson
> (FreecoinsToXML) get together on this it should be a snap !

That would depend on freecoins developers having the time to respond. So far, 
there is little sign of activity.

(Isn't is freecoinsExport, not FreecoinsToXML?)

> QIF would be a last resort. QOF sounds, from what I've just read, like
> da bomb ! It's just a matter of rejuvinating the palm code, I guess.
>
> Any thing I can do ? Just a palm / linux user with a similar itch !

Not really. Join the freecoins mailing list and find out what everyone is 
doing? Find out what is being done, how much activity etc. I was kind of 
hoping that your enquiry indicated an existing knowledge of the freecoins 
code or future development direction or recent activity levels.

If you have some code experience, get involved with the pilot-link programs 
and perhaps get a bash script that can retrieve the data using existing 
pilot-link programs. That would at least help develop a C program that would 
use the code for those programs to create a single conduit to retrieve all 
the necessary data in one sync operation, not three. Just some procedural 
stuff would be useful: Which fields in which database are essential to all 
invoices? Which fields are optional? Which might be ignored completely?

I need:
1. A particular custom field that is used as the BillingID in GnuCash
2. The start and end time from Calendar
3. The company and job name from Contacts
4. All expenses recorded for that day in Expenses (amount, type, company, 
city)
5. Options to retrieve specific dates
6. Notes for particular companies - either via standardised memo formats or 
custom fields in Contacts or notes in contacts (note: using Contacts for this 
would result in massive duplication when one company has lots of jobs.) Notes 
would include rates, discounts, unpaid absence (lunch) etc.

That last one is the weakest. It may be better to have a separate file or 
database of some kind that stores the stuff that is specific to a company, 
not a job. There are also problems with getting the same company name/details 
in the Palm and in GnuCash. A C program on the host machine would be able to 
store the GnuCash GUID for that customer and job more easily than a Palm 
database - at least, that's how I'd see it.

> pilot-link code and HotSync in the same sentance ? Isn't HotSync (TM)
> the sync from the .. um, other operating system ??

Umm, no. HotSync is part of Palm. OK, there are issues with the non GPL Palm 
SDK but the SDK is available, albeit without genuine freedom. MacOSX calls it 
HotSync too, as does the Palm itself.

> >  Then FreeCoins would simply
> > be interrogated by the pilot-link conduit code, provide the data to build
> > the QofBook on the computer and write out a suitable XML file for merge.
>
> That sounds like Christmas ! .. can I open it before Christmas ?

No. I'm leaning more and more to using the host machine instead of the PDA for 
one simple reason: PalmOS isn't a fixed target and the devices keep changing. 
Developing for a stable environment, like GNU/Linux, is a far more 
straightforward project and therefore more likely to succeed and continue. 
The apparent lack of activity in freecoins is increasing this tendency.

I'm afraid that I wouldn't use freecoins as it stands for personal accounting 
- it doesn't suit my needs. All I need is the invoice functionality - if it 
was added to freecoins, I'd use that. Otherwise, I'll work with pilot-link to 
create the functionality on the host machine.

-- 

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