Gnucash/AqBanking Packaging

[David T.]

John, 

If I were to volunteer for this, I think the result would not be an improvement, unfortunately.

I certainly agree that adding this functionality directly into the Gnucash sphere increases the maintenance load, and I also know that I am ill-equipped to code anything much beyond a simple Applescript. However, we are currently in a situation where the tool we have selected to provide this functionality requires a lot of user work to set up, and can break quite quickly, due to the formatting of ever-changing remote sites.

I took a quick look at the spec for the price DB (http://svn.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/group__Price.html), and see that it has just six defined data elements: commodity, currency, value, time, source, and type. Source and type appear to be optional. 

In my brain, it seems like it should be possible to set up a mechanism 
that allows Mere Users to create and update a text profile for a given 
online price source. Said profile would define basic source info, and 
then the start/end strings that delineate the data elements we need. 
Under such a situation, it would be possible for users to repair their 
quote retrieval themselves (by changing the text file), and share these changes more generally through the 
mailing lists.

I have taken some time to look at the Perl for F::Q (http://search.cpan.org/~ecocode/Finance-Quote-1.17/lib/Finance/Quote.pm), and have been reminded how much I am not a Perl programmer, as I marvel at the mystery of the code there. My ability with Perl is so limited that I am only able to say that I honestly don't know whether my hypothetical method is how F::Q already does it.

All the best,
David



----- Original Message -----
From: John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>
To: Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 4:04 PM
Subject: Re: Gnucash/AqBanking Packaging


On Sep 20, 2012, at 2:41 PM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> --On September 20, 2012 9:19:25 AM -0400 Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> 
>> Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> writes:
>> 
>>>> How about JavaScript? We're already bundling Webkit-Gtk, and that
>>>> includes a JavaScript interpreter and all of the web paraphernalia.
>>>> It shouldn't be too hard to write a C routine to exec a JavaScript
>>>> program and retrieve the result.
>>> 
>>> The language it's written in is not the issue.  Maintaining the price
>>> quote software is a big job because the various web sites it scrapes
>>> for prices keep changing.  Rewriting it in Python, Javascript, or
>>> anything else won't help that.
>> 
>> No, but if *we* maintain it ourselves the we wouldn't be depending on
>> a third party to keep it up to date -- we could just push an update.
>> And even better, if it WERE Javascript we could even theoretically
>> host a copy on www.gnucash.org!  That would let us update the grabber
>> code for everyone is near-real-time!
> 
> Right, all I was trying to say is that we're signing up for a lot of work if we take this on.
> 

I thought that David was volunteering. ;-)

Regards,
John Ralls


_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user at gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.