Application integration tips...

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 24 April 2015 10:32:52 Allan wrote:
> This is kind of a general question. I'm trying to stitch together
> various applications to add to GC features and wondering about how
> quickly this can be done, i.e. automation, i.e. to avoid... "death by
> a thousand clicks". It's very time consuming and error prone to i.e. 
> go to a web site, log on, nagivate to page, download data, edit for
> import, import, track, update and repeat.
> 
> For point of sale, and inventory:
> 
> I do cash sales in some 20-30 sales tax jurisdictions and SquareUp has
> a free app with credit card processing, point of sale for cash,
> checks, some inventory features looks nice. Many csv data download
> options...
> 
> How can it be integrated into GC? i.e.
> 
> Is there a way to i.e. "one-click" get this data to a desktop/linux or
> phone/android, import it? Or a few clicks not 30?
> 
> I use KeePass2 which speeds up logon with a key press simulator. I
> wish it could just click, get the data.
> 
> Sed scripts, emacs macros to edit csv data? Does LibreOffice, GnuCash
> have a macro feature? I wish I could just "click, update GC"
> 
> Any tips for this sort of thing?
> 
While not "officially supported" your best bet is probably the python bindings. That way you can 
write whatever scripts that parse your csv data (or even download it from said websites) and 
feed it into gnucash.

The documentation is sparse unfortunately. There are some example scripts [1] which you 
could use as a start and I know some people on this list (or the gnucash-devel list) actively use 
them.

All this is of course only possible if your version of gnucash was built with python support...

Regards,

Geert

[1] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/tree/master/src/optional/python-bindings/example_scripts