Monthly Income/Expense Reports

Jeff Kletsky gnucash at allycomm.com
Sat Feb 20 11:08:31 EST 2010


On 2/19/10 3:59 PM, trythis wrote:
> Crazy...I have been attempting a complete 6 column version of this [report] and
> running this report each time takes 10 seconds of so of data crunching. My
> PC fans have kicked up from running them. I think running all 12 might take
> quite a while.  Its like rendering video almost.
>    
I'm likely on to at least one of the problems here, in that the 2.2.x 
HTML creation and rendering seems to take the bulk of the time taken, at 
least for the budget report (nearly 15 seconds to create the HTML from 
collected data across two months of personal income and spending). I'd 
be surprised if other reports were no structured in similar ways and 
suffer similar problems. I'm in the process of rewriting that report 
using the 2.3.x framework, which (a) optionally uses webkit instead of 
the current, grey-haired gtkHTML (no CSS support), and (b) allows eguile 
to render HTML that bypasses the old-style HTML-generation code and 
hopefully many of its inefficiencies.

Another of the potential problems is the collection of the data. The 
sooner the XML backend is abandoned, the sooner internals will be able 
to much more efficiently look at the data as a database, rather than 
just frantically paw through a collection of records. Just my opinion on 
that, and there is still plenty of time for everyone to have theirs 
heard. (I believe XML is a great interchange format, but not a "right" 
answer for data storage and access for this application).

I can't offer to rewrite the report for you, nor are there any 
significant number of Guile-based web developers out there, but eguile 
certainly has the potential to take writing reports from obscenely 
difficult to potentially do-able for someone used to some of the simple 
web-templating systems, like PHP.


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