Reports, probably again

Colin Scott gnucash at double-bars.net
Wed Aug 10 17:06:00 EDT 2011


>  If XML, what are the tags.  

So long as the tags are published, does it really matter?  Presumably they should be reasonable descriptive, and probably (though I'm biassed!) should be descriptive in English rather than any other language, but apart form that we are talking implementation detail here, surely?

>  If CSV, what is the output like.

Well, you know what the pretty-print report looks like.  Well, the output will be series of comma(*)-separated fields (with appropriate and consistent quoting for fields containing commas!) according to the conventional (or Microsoft!) definition of CSV.  The only wrinkles compared to current practice with HTML reports, are that:

i) there must be the exact number of commas to ensure that relevant fields are positioned in their proper columns.  (The current HTML reports have screwed up this basic convention, so if you import the HTML into (eg) Excel, the columnar layout is broken.

ii) columns containing no data should be left blank, with no whitespace characters!!!

Other than that, what is there to know?


(*) Of course, it needn't be commas, but they are conventional ...


Colin


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