preferences

[Maris]

Hi Derek,

On Tue, 24 May 2011 16:32:10 +0200, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Maris <maris.rob at vdi.de> writes:
>
>> I'm going to use gnucash as an effective means to do bookkeeping of my
>> hours spent to several customers and associated projects, using the
>> STD  currency as shortform for "Stunden" (hours) in german.
>>
>> At this time I encounter the need to select different preferences for
>> this application than for my financial bookkeeping. But the
>> preferences are  stored globally. Is there any means to have them
>> associated with the  gnucash file opened?
>
> At this time I'm afraid that no, the split of preferences is not
> amenable to this.  It's something that needs to be worked on.
>
> One thing that would be helpful would be a list of every preference and
> a way to categorize it as:
>
> - user pref      (per user for every data file)
> - data pref      (per data file for every user)
> - user/data      (per user, per data file)
>
> I believe there are lots of prefs in the first item that arguably should
> live in the second or third category.  Note that File -> Properties
> (instead of Edit -> Preferences) provides access to the second category.

As a probable route to implement this iteratively I'd propose to extend  
the .gnucash/xxx.gnucash.gcm file with a section where assignments can be  
specified that correspond to the Edit->Preferences entries (or a new file  
for this). Actually, this would represent the third category. This  
requires that this file be read after reading the "global" preferences, in  
the style of SciTE hierarchical preference file reads: global - user -  
local. For a while this would eliminate the pain of writing a GUI for  
copies of parameter sets on a more local level where it must be visible to  
the user whether a parameter equals the "parent" value or not (this saved  
the SciTE guys a lot of programming effort, but SciTE is a programmer's  
tool, and hence, it is reasonable).

-Rob