aqbanking info

[Martin Preuss]

Hi,

On Montag 24 Januar 2011, Paul Abrahams wrote:
> As Phil Frost pointed out, there are  ofx info sites in addition to the
> wiki page that you will find with google, but they all suffer from the
> same problems. Yet someone must know about all these fields because
> someone designed these forms (the ones that you fill out during
> aqbanking/ofx setup).  Is there an aqbanking group out there somewhere,
> perhaps, that might provide this information?
[...]

We have a mailing list for AqBanking issues (see 
"http://lists.aqbanking.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aqbanking-user").

Most documentation for AqBanking is in German because most of the really open 
banking protocols only work in Germany (HBCI, FinTS, EBICS, the latter is also 
used in France).

The OFX DirectConnect protocol OTOH has open specs, but the US banks are 
rather obstructive with this protocol (e.g. you need to tell them you are 
using Quicken, otherwise most banks won't help you at all, and in addition to 
that they don't publish the information needed for non-Quicken applications to 
setup the banking stuff etc.).

However, for the not-so-new-anymore AqBanking5 I created special setup dialogs 
for OFX DirectConnect (see 
"http://www2.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/manual5/setup_ofx_user.php") and we 
now use OFXHome to retrieve server information to make things easier for OFX 
users.

To summarize: I am extremely frustrated with how the US banks (together with 
Intuit) treat the OFX specs and the information needed for Open Source 
applications to setup OFX DC. The German examples proof rather nicely that 
providing setup information together with open protocols does not compromise 
the security of online banking... That's why I was more than once 
contemplating the removal of OFX DirectConnect support from AqBanking...

Anyway, AqBanking5 has the best support for OFX DC of all versions of 
AqBanking. Hopefully, GnuCash can successfully switch to that new generation 
at some point to benefit from those improvements.


Regards
Martin



-- 
"Things are only impossible until they're not"

Martin Preuss - http://www2.aquamaniac.de/
AqBanking - http://www.aqbanking.de/
LibChipcard - http://www.libchipcard.de/