Custom reports - what's the latest word?

[Andrew Sackville-West]

Jeff Smith wrote:
> It seems that in my current installation (v 1.8.9) there is no way to 
> save my changes to the defaults for the various reports, and no way to 
> add my own reports. (Or have I missed some trick somewhere?)

The saved reports has a known issue in that youmust change the report 
name before saving, or it causes crashes. I've never used it personally, 
as I just leave all my reports open and suffer through the long load 
times. one day I'll fiddle with it and save 'em...
> 
> If I understand correctly, I can add custom reports if I write them in 
> the scripting language and then build my own executable from source 
> every time I have a new report to add or change.

You can build your own reports using scheme/guile. Look at the existing 
reports at <gnucash base directory>/share/guile-modules/gnucash/report 
and its fairly easy to figure out. YOu have to tie them into the menu 
structure through standard-reports.scm (I think...). You do not have to 
recompile, just set-up the report, restart gnucash and its right there. 
google for "gnucash custom reports" and you should get something useful.

> 
> I can live with that (coding don't scare me none) but if I do that, is 
> there a more recent version in the CVS tree that I should consider 
> upgrading to? Any new features that might address any of these issues 
> for me? Otherwise, I'd be tempted to stick with the stable 1.8.9 release.

current stable release is 1.8.12 (last one in the 1.8 branch). You 
should probably upgrade. source is avail. at 
http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/tags/1.8.12/

svn co http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/tags/1.8.12/  <destination 
directory>

should get it for you. compiling is tricky sometimes as you need the 
-devel packages for a lot of stuff. but its definitely doable and fun!!