Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend

[David T.]

I agree with you about how nice it would be to have reliable retrieval of prices. However, from a strict accounting perspective, the trading value of a particular asset is not relevant. The value is only relevant when an asset is sold. Of course, most of us are curious to know what our investments are worth TODAY, but that's not how GnuCash considers it.

For what it's worth, there are a number of threads over the years about importing historical price quote data. They mostly involve using Python to gather the source data and import it to the price db. See, for example, http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Stocks/get_prices 

I have not tested any of these (despite my fervent wish to do so) mainly because the Mac version of GnuCash doesn't ship with Python scripting enabled, and I am not well-versed in compiling all that funky stuff...

David


________________________________
 From: David <dgpickett at aol.com>
To: sunfish62 at yahoo.com; janssens-geert at telenet.be 
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org 
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2013 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend
 


One never knows if one is going to get back to it.  Blame my parents and toilet trainingerrors?  :D
 

Collecting prices for reports is a major function that should be automatic.  I just did a year-to-date for my portfolio for month end last price, and it was a royal carpal-tunnel pain.

Auto save should work consistently and globally.  If it did, I would not find, next day, a hanging GnuCash save before exitdialogfrom my 23:30 crontab script.  Auto-save failure is a universal worry, for data security and reliability.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
To: janssens-geert <janssens-geert at telenet.be>; David <dgpickett at aol.com>
Cc: gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Sent: Mon, Nov 18, 2013 12:55 pm
Subject: Re: Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend


Having sat by since suggesting a shell script, I would like to ask at this point why you don't just close GnuCash when you are done for the day?
Then there are no issues with unsaved changes. I imagine that a crafty script could even do your lookups immediately after Gnucash exits. Or, as a startup script, when you fire up Gnucash first thing in the morning...
David
 



________________________________
 From:  David <dgpickett at aol.com>; 
To:  <janssens-geert at telenet.be>; 
Cc:  <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>; 
Subject:  Re: Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend 
Sent:  Mon, Nov 18, 2013 1:19:35 PM 


The GNU Cash auto save seems to help ensure that GNU Cash can be ended by wmctl most of the time, now that I tickled it by reducing the interval, but occasionally it forgets.  Maybe it is not allowed to save all sorts of pending events?

Perhaps the gtk development tool is getting in the way of reliable, full features?  There should be hooks of some sort to do anything you can do in C.



-----Original Message-----
From: Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be>
To: David <dgpickett at aol.com>
Cc: gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>; maf <maf at chilwell.net>
Sent: Sat, Nov 9, 2013 1:42 am
Subject: Re: Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend


On Wednesday 06 November 2013 16:11:46 David wrote:
> wmcntl -c GnuCash works as well as you said, but hangs on the dialog
> if anything is not saved.
Yes, it's up to you to make sure nothing is left unsaved when the 
cronjob runs. If you make the cron job run long enough after your last 
edit, that could be solved with the autosave feature already in GnuCash. 
Otherwise 2.5.7 indeed can be configured to save on close automatically 
after a timeout.

>  What's the virtue of having stuff not
> saved?  It is just data looking to get lost, not why you use a tool
> like this.

As said before on this thread, the gnucash core was written a long time 
ago, well before sqlite existed. Regarding unsaved data, it uses the 
idiom of
 typical office applications: you save your work when you are 
happy with it. Not saving immediately can be a (crude) way to undo 
mistakes.

It may not be the optimal way for things to work from your perspective, 
but that's simply the way it is currently and probably will be for some 
time.

> 
> 
>  It's be nice if GnuCash took some signal and saved and exited.
> 
There's no way that I know of coded directly into GnuCash. But GnuCash 
is a gtk based application. Does Gtk have such features (for example 
using dbus) ? I'm just guessing here.

Geert


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