Error Parsing the File

[Geert Janssens]

Op donderdag 16 februari 2012 10:42:58 schreef Derek Atkins:
> RaymondR <rraw at bigfoot.com> writes:
> > Just a note to confirm that I followed Geert's instructions and found a
> > transaction that had no <trn:date-posted> tag.  Once I added the tag
> > manually, the "Error parsing ..." message went away and all was well.
> > 
> > The particular transaction just happen to be an "Opening Balance"
> > transaction on a new account.
> > 
> > The error was originally created on 2.4.0
> 
> Just for kicks, can you try to create a new file in 2.4.10 and see if it
> generates an opening balance with an invalid (or missing) date-posted?
> 
Don't bother... This is a known bug [1] which I managed to fix [2] in the 
development version of GnuCash a while ago. I never backported it, because the 
fix was part of a bigger code change which is not wanted on 2.4. This makes it 
impossible to backport the fix as is. With some effort, a similar fix could be 
written for 2.4, but I never got to it, and probably won't in the near future.

On the 2.4 series, I can only advice Windows users not to use the opening 
balance feature in the New Accounts Hierarchy Druid or the Accounts properties 
dialog. Instead, just setup opening balance transactions manually.

Note that I also added an entry [2] in the GnuCash FAQ about this some time 
ago, explaining what happened and how to recover from it.

Geert

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611853
[2] http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/changeset/20592
[3] 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_When_I_try_to_open_my_datafile_on_Windows.2C_I_get_.22Parse_error.22._What_happened_.3F