global delete of transactions

[Andrew Sackville-West]

Josh Sled wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 17:05 +0200, Arthur Gregson wrote:
> 
>>is it possible to delete previous years transactions from all accounts 
>>globally.....
> 
> 
> No; batch transaction manipulation is not supported.
> 
> 
>>I know i can use find(in tools menu) to bring up these records - but do i have 
>>to delete each record manually - or is there another way to do this
> 
> 
> Editing the data file.  The transactions of interest will be easily
> discernable.  If you're handy with XSLT and/or a scripting language it
> shouldn't be too hard.
> 
>      NOTE this is NOT recommended or supported!!! Keep data file 
>      backups.
> 
this question keeps popping up on the list every few weeks. It should be 
fairly simple to write a script to do this and post it up somewhere. 
What are some options that could be included?

I'm thinking:

1. Delete all transactions from a specified date range

2. Summarize all transactions from a date range and enter one cumulative 
transaction to allow past year reporting (allowing you to keep past year 
information more compactly. sort of like intuits end-of-year stuff). 
This may be more of a business feature, i suppose to compare sales from 
past years etc.

3 Make a backup of transactions from a date range in a seperate file.

any others?

this seems to be something that doesn't need to be done within gnucash 
and for expediency of implementation might ultimately be easier from a 
simple (heh) script

A
> ...jsled
>