bank account interest

[Josh Sled]

On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 11:38, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Unfortunately this doesn't solve the "accountBalance(acct)" issue in order to
> get the current balance of the account in question.

I guess that's "unfortunate", but luckily the user wasn't asking for
that...

Anyways, the degenerate case of getting the current account balance
could probably be derived from what I posted pretty easily, given
existing API.

The biggest problems with extending the application to handle
`getAccountBalanceOn( acct [, date] )` more generally are:

1/ The expression parser is probably going to choke with parsing the
account names given the silly options we have for account-path-seperator
configuration.

2/ Editing the account-name/path as text without the benefit of
auto-completion is a nasty burden to place on users.

3/ Moreover, the formula should store the account GUID, but converse
with the user about path/name -- this is going to require a significant
change to how many pieces of the app work; it'd be nice to do a small
[well, _larger_ -- visually -- than our current text-fields, but small
in feature-space] formula editor at the same time.

4/ Also, there should probably be appropriate cleanup if/when the
account goes away, which is a general SX (and GnuCash, I think) issue.

5/ The whole notion of "current" is tricky, especially in the face of
creating multiple SXes at once ... we probably need a stronger notion of
a "temporal excursion" that allows speculative computations to be done.
Or, we reduce functionality in this area, which may be the saner path.

...jsled

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