Mass deletion of transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Ricardo Biloti <biloti at gmail.com> writes:

> I consider two possibilities to overcome such difficulty.
>
> 1) apply a simple operation to all entries of a search.
> After search for all transactions, the user would be allowed to delete,
> export, switch one of the accounts, etc. This feature however may imply in
> moderate to high efforts in interface design and implementation.
>
> 2) native format for exporting/importing of transactions.
> The user searchs for transactions he/she wants to keep, then export them
> and reimport them into a new file. This export/import format however must
> be gnucash native, instead of CSV, to avoid any information loss or
> necessity of recheck all transactions for consistency and correctness. As a
> developer, I consider this easier to implement, and more valuable as it
> address other issues, like the possibility to backup just of part of the
> transactions, not specifically related in time, like it is done in the log
> files.
>
> Besides, I would suggest that all accounts have a simple ID that could be
> used to inform both accounts of each transaction in the CSV import. This
> would greatly improve the CSV mass import of transactions. I believe that
> the implementation effort related to such feature is worthy.
>
> Are those potencial features valuable to others?

I'm not sure how widely usable these features are.  You are correctin
that implementing #1 would be very challenging given the current
architecture.  #2 would likely be possible, but still challenging given
the way the code works.

Going back to your original question: I'm curious why you feel you need
to mass-delete a bunch of transactions?  Usually this implies either:

a) you want to go back in time, to which I would say "go to a backup",
or
b) you want to split your books up, to which I would say "you don't need
to -- gnucash will happily continue going"

So... why do you feel you need to mass delete a bunch of transactions?

> R.Biloti

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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