How to stop security prices from appearing in price editor automatically?

[David Carlson]

On 4/14/2015 7:20 AM, William Sunday wrote:
> On 4/13/2015 8:33 PM, John Ralls wrote:
>>
>>> On Apr 13, 2015, at 7:07 PM, William Sunday
>>> <gnucash546 at lewenberg.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I just upgraded from GnuCash 2.4 to 2.6 and I see that calculated
>>> stock prices from transactions are appearing automatically in the
>>> Price Editor.
>>>
>>> This is definitely a change from 2.4 and an unwelcome one. I want to
>>> control the prices entries in the Price Editor. Furthermore, the
>>> _incorrect_ price is entered if I mistype the stock share amount or
>>> price paid and not fixed even I correct the mistake in the transaction.
>>>
>>> How can I stop GnuCash from being so helpful and entering these
>>> prices in the Price Editor?
>>
>> There's no way to stop it at present, though you can certainly delete
>> it in the Price Editor after the fact.
>
> That's too bad. I hope you can add an option to support the old
> behavior of not automatically adding to the prices table in a future
> version.
>
>>
>> We added that so that reports would reflect the actual price of
>> commodities paid rather than some retrieved market price which
>> probably doesn't reflect the actual price. If there's a bug here it's
>> that it doesn't correct the recorded price if the transaction is
>> edited, though it would be non-trivial to implement.
>
> In my workflow, most of my transactions have to be entered by hand,
> and so I duplicate existing records and then edit the duplicates. This
> means that the stock prices are wrong until I edit the duplicates.
> Since the incorrect prices in the price editor are not corrected even
> after editing the transaction, this means many incorrect prices in the
> price editor.
>
> This is definitely a bug, and a bug that most will not notice if they
> do not edit prices by hand.
>
> This is where raw SQL becomes useful:
>
> DELETE FROM prices
> WHERE source = 'user:split-register'
>
>
>
>>
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>>
>
>
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I beg to differ about this new(?) behavior being a bug.  I think it is
critical for correct reports to have the prices actually paid or
received on the date reported.  Even that may not be entirely accurate
if multiple lots were traded on the same date, but it would be preferred
to missing prices.  I think that somewhere in the dim past GnuCash used
to enter prices automatically, and that got broken somewhere around the
2.4 release.  If that is true, this is already a bug fix rather than new
behavior.

I have been struggling for years to manually enter these numbers.  As
for correcting a value that appeared due to an incorrect transaction
entry (including incorrect security, account and date, which could
result from replicating a similar transaction and saving it
prematurely), I think a direct  link to the security price derived from
that transaction would be nice, but as John implied, is far from
trivial.  Otherwise, it is not that hard to open the price editor and
check when such a mistake is discovered. 

When you are duplicating from similar historical transactions the new
price value normally is not recorded until you press the enter key, so
correcting all fields first before saving usually avoids incorrect price
values.  This may be more difficult if starting from a transaction
involving a different security or account, but I do that regularly and I
personally find it manageable.

David C