Associating Saved Reports and Preferences with Data File.

[David Carlson]

On 3/22/2012 5:28 PM, David T. wrote:
> Derek--
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
>  From: Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU>
> To: David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> 
> Cc: "philologos at mindspring.com" <philologos at mindspring.com>; "john.layman at laymanandlayman.com" <john.layman at laymanandlayman.com>; "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:25 AM
> Subject: Re: Associating Saved Reports and Preferences with Data File.
>  
> 
>>> You mention the difficulty of setting up the reports to be associated with a
>>> particular data file. Can you explain in a little more detail what those
>>> difficulties are?
>>
>> Well, the #1 question is storage location.  Where do you store the
>> saved reports?  I cannot think of a good place offhand in a way that
>> makes them travel with the data file.
> 
> In an ideal world, the report specifications would somehow be a *part* of the datafile. That, of course, would be problematic from the backward-compatibility perspective, not to mention creating appropriate structures in the file formats (one in XML and one in the SQL files) to hold them.
> 
> A second idea would be to keep the reports file in the same folder as the data file, and name it according to the data file to which it applies. Thus, if I have a data file MyAccountData.gnucash, there would be a corresponding MyAccountData.reports file in the same folder. While it doesn't guarantee that the reports would go with the data, at least they're together in one folder, and the user has a better chance of seeing it. 
> 
> This would probably work better still if there were a setting to put backup files in a separate folder. That would result in the data folder containing only a couple of files that clearly relate to one another. 
> 
> David
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As another user, your suggestion strikes me as being similar to the
Quicken of olden days, which used to be divided up into five different
sub-files.  I believe that there were good reasons for them to migrate
away from that model.  The most obvious one is how to make sure all the
files are always kept together.

There may be ways to begin preparing today for a future migration in the
database specification to include custom report specifications, perhaps
around the same time that GnuCash finally deprecates XML format.  Such
topics are important to discuss today, but it will take a long time to
see actual implementation of whatever decision is made.

I would say that the best interim solution is to clearly document in the
user guide how and where Gnucash presently stores this information so
that users who care can find it and back it up, for every major OS,
including how to figure out what %user% means to those of us who are not
computer geeks.

David C
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