Making it easier to create custom reports

[John Ralls]

On Apr 27, 2012, at 11:45 AM, Jeff Laughlin wrote:

> I've had a few thoughts on how to make it easier for folks to generate
> custom reports, or at least a custom appearance, without learning
> Scheme. Forgive me if these have been floated or accomplished before
> (and please send me the link).
> 
> My first idea is to create a pseudo "report" in scheme that
> fork/exec's a program specified by the user and passes it some
> arguments. E.g. I recently wrote a Python invoice printer using the
> gnucash python API. I run it from the command line and pass it the URL
> to my gnucash book and invoice ID. It would be convenient if I could
> select it off the report menu and have gnucash pass those arguments
> automatically. The program could even return HTML to gnucash via
> stdout. Would that not be trivial for a scheme programmer to create?
> 
> My second idea is similar but even easier for the report generator.
> Again write a pseudo "report" in scheme that takes all of the report
> data and serialises it to JSON or XML. Then it could fork a new
> process, pass the serialized data to it via stdin, and again
> optionally receive HTML from stdout for display. Now the programmer
> doesn't have to know anything about the gnucash API or scheme and can
> handle report presentation in the language of their choice without
> requiring gnucash bindings.
> 
> Both of these ideas seem very doable and in keeping with 'nix
> philosophy. Are there any scheme programmers willing to volunteer
> their efforts?

Those are both quite workable ideas. They could be implemented in C if the enterprising volunteer prefers that to Scheme. 

Regards,
John Ralls