Custom Reports

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Wed Aug 18 12:58:37 EDT 2010


Hi,

David Eisner <deisner at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 5:39 AM, Geert Janssens
> <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
>> I won't say this is the perfect setup, but at least an important improvement
>> already.
>
> Stepping back and thinking big picture for a moment, I'm curious: how
> did it get to be the way it is now, in 2.2.9?  The behavior Derek
> described earlier in the thread is nothing anybody would have designed
> in from scratch. Perhaps it was the result of several expedient
> decisions made over the years (by people who actually contributed
> patches -- I'm not judging).

Indeed, it was the result of several small steps over time.  Set your
way-back machine to the early '00s.  At the time there was no way to
remember report settings.  So Christian decided to fix that problem.  He
added a button and that button would stream out the current report
option settings to a file.  When you restarted gnucash it would read
back in that file and add those entries to a menu so you could re-run
reports with the same settings.  Voila, we had our first report saving
feature.

There were some limitations.  The streamed report settings were really
just a 'diff' off the defaults, so you needed to link back to the
original report in order to apply the diffs.  Also, you had to make sure
the report had a different name because reports were always referenced
by name.  If you had two reports called "Balance Sheet" then when you
asked gnucash to run the "Balance Sheet" report it was unclear which
version you would get.  So we made users change the name of the report
before being allowed to save it.

But at this point there was no way to REMOVE saved reports so Andrew
tried to add some UI to help manage them.

And that brings us to today....

As you can see, none of this was ever designed or planned out.  It just
sort of came one piece at a time over years of small incremental
changes.  But who wants to rewrite the whole system?

> Just wondering (and hoping one or more people have the institutional
> memory to answer).

Hopefully I helped.

> -David

> 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


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