Top level account without any type (or file links)

[Stuart McGraw]

On 05/16/2012 11:03 AM, David Carlson wrote:
> On 5/16/2012 11:04 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:
>> On 16-05-12 17:35, Colin Scott wrote:
>>>> In fact, what you really want is:
>>>>
>>>> A separate set of books for each partnership.
>>> The real downside of this is that (unless something has changed
>>> recently) it isn't possible to keep more than one set of books open
>>> at the same time.  If you are the book-keeper for multiple sets of
>>> accounts, moving from one set of books to the next is slow and
>>> horribly clunky.
>>[...]
>> Actually it is possible to keep more than one set of books open at the
>> same time. In fact I do it all the time as I manage 3 small businesses
>> with GnuCash.
>>
>> You can't do it via File->Open, but you can double-click on several
>> data files in your OS's native file manager and the books will open
>> next to each other.
>>
>> I wasn't there when the decision was made regarding File->Open
>> automatically closing currently open books, but I guess the it was
>> made based on the most frequent use case of that time: one person
>> usually only manages one set of books. There were no business features
>> then. This is obviously not the case for me or you.
>>
>> And yes, I think that it will indeed require quite some refactoring of
>> the code before this can be changed. GnuCash assumes in many places
>> there is only one book open at the time. My solution is a workaround,
>> which works because it opens two completely independent instances of
>> GnuCash. Each instances only sees one book.
>>[...]
>
> A couple of questions about this scenario:
> 
> Isn't there only one set of user preferences?  What if the user changes
> a preference in one instance.  Is it lost if another instance is the
> last to be closed?

It appears from a quick test I jut did, that if you change the 
preferences in one instance of Gnucash, the preference will 
immediately change in the other instance as well.  So closing 
order does not matter. 

Of course this implies there is only one set of user preferences 
that will apply to all open instances of Gnucash but that it a 
fairly common state of affairs -- my preferred media player (VLC)
has only one set of user preferences no matter how many instances 
of it I open.

> How about custom reports?  I think some preferences may be linked to the
> filename, but I believe that many are not.

Custom reports seem to be a per-user item and the same set of
custom reports appear in all open (by the same user) Gnucash 
instances.