direction on adding customers and receivables

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Please remember to cc the gnucash-user list on all your replies.
That way other people can help answer you, especially over long
holiday weekends.

Michael Tenenbaum <mtenenbaum at strategic-techs.com> writes:

> Hi, Derek:
>
> It looks like I really don't need to add customers from my
> application, as a trigger on the GNC customer table should take care
> of that.  I.e., when a customer is added/updated/deleted a trigger
> would execute a transaction in my schema.
>
> But what I really do need is an API interface to charge receivables
> against a particular customer.  Can you help me locate the appropriate
> API for that?  I'm asking because I cannot find any reference to an
> API in GNC download.

We have a few APIs, in C, Scheme, and (soon to be in the 2.4 release) in
Python.  The C API is documented in http://code.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/
and the Scheme and Python APIs are derived directly from the C APIs.

> Thanks.
>
> BTW, I went to the 'tute also, but it was 37 years ago in the days we
> could get one Fortran compile done per day while being careful to
> watch the DP budget (one compile = $125).  I was in Course 1
> (transportation) and worked on Joe Sussman's railroad project -- It's
> still going on and getting funded.  We simulated the operation of a
> freight railroad.  Gotta laugh now that a couple of PhDs came out of
> that simulation study as I could now knock that programming off in a
> couple of weeks. But there were good times at the Muddy Charles Pub
> that made up for the frustration of not getting your stuff compiled.

Yeah, I was there 15-20 years ago myself.  A great place to "grow up"  :)

> mike.

-derek

>
>
> At 09:01 AM 12/23/2009, you wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>Michael Tenenbaum <mtenenbaum at strategic-techs.com> writes:
>>
>> > I would like to use GNC as the accounting backbone for our office
>> > automation system.  We're using Postgresql as the database.
>> >
>> > For this reason I need to know how to:
>> >
>> > (1) Add a customer from our application (bypassing GNC)
>> >
>> > (2) Add a receivable from our application to the general ledger
>> (bypassing GNC)
>>
>>GnuCash does not support users writing to the database behind GnuCash's
>>back.  In other words, neither of these operations are supported.  If
>>you want to write into the GnuCash database you MUST use the GnuCash API
>>(in C, Scheme, or Python).  Writing to the database directly can cause
>>data loss, so we do not support it (just like we don't support writing
>>to the XML data file directly).
>>
>> > Thanks.
>> >
>> > mike.
>>
>> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>
>>-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available