Autofill for entering assets names: broken ?

Eric Dedieu papa.eric at free.fr
Wed Nov 7 19:31:36 EST 2012


Hi,

I'm using gnucash 2.4.11, with a 3-level account hierarchy. The first
level uses for brevity a single letter, A: for Assets, E: for
Expenses. I name sub-accounts with different first letters, so using
only the keyboard I can enter an account name, for example typing
"E:L:M" is enough for "E:Leisure:Mountain", or "A:F:C" for
"A:FirstBank:Children". Autofilling makes it easy.

This was working very well, until I started to keep tracks for 2
persons, using A: and E: for the 1st, and AA: and EE: for the other.

After a while, autofilling began to drift from the expected behaviour.
Typically, things lke:

A:Bar
AA:Foo
AA:Foo:Bar

-> "A:" autofills to "AA:Foo" (caret after :) instead of A:Bar (caret after :)

-> "A:F" autofills as far as "A:Foo:Bar" (caret after second :)
instead of "A:Foo" (caret after :)

When I use the mouse to open the dropdown asset list, I see that the
order of lines is inconsistent, as if A: and AA: were compared as
equal for sorting. I can have a dropdown list like:

A
A:Bar
AA
A:Coco
A:Coco:Nut
AA:Bar
AA:Other
A:Foo
A:Other
AA:What

In this list, extracting a same prefix (A: or AA:) the sort order is
ok, but prefixes seem interleaved randomly.

I can't guess why autofilling would also go "too far", i.e., typing a
":" would fill two levels (second example above).

This broke little by little. At first there were just some failures,
now the keyboard has become unusable and I have to use the mouse, drop
down and click. It  may be renaming/moving/adding/deleting accounts
that broke it step by step, I did refactor the account hierarchy
extensively. I didn't use much the dropdown list when the keyboard was
enough, so I didn't notice when it got messed up.

I wonder if the dropdown order is stored somewhere and not simply
dynamically computed? then how could I erase it to be rebuilt cleanly?

If nobody was hurt by that problem yet, it may be specific to repeated
letters as account names? Using A1 and A2 would not be so easy to type
in, but may be worth trying...

Thanks for any hint,
Eric


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