GnuCash Not Happy With External File Renaming

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Sat Apr 30 04:06:42 EDT 2016


On Friday 29 April 2016 22:44:01 Ron Westfall wrote:
> Hi
> 
> GnuCash 2.6.12, MacOSX 10.10.5
> 
> I am a new user of GnuCash.  I have checked the documentation and
> FAQs, so my apologies if this issue is already known.
> 
> I created a new GnuCase file Foo.gnucash.  I then shut down GnuCash.
> Using MacOS's Finder, I renamed the file to Bar.gnucash. I then
> double-clicked on Bar.gnucash to open it.  Instead, GnuCash tries to
> open Foo.gnucash during startup (splash screen showing) and whines
> about it being missing ("The file
> file:///Users/Ron/Desktop/Foo.gnucash could not be found").  When I
> close the whine dialog window, I get an empty window with title
> Unsaved Book and two buttons Save and Close.  Close does nothing.
> Save shows a standard file save dialog.  If you provide a file name
> such as Gunk, an empty Gunk.gnucash file is saved.  Regardless of
> what you open next time, GnuCash attempts to open Gunk.gnucash.
> 
> The only way to open the renamed Bar.gnucash file is to make sure the
> last opened GnuCash file exists, let GnuCash open it and then
> explicitly open Bar.gnucash using File > Open.
> 
> As a new user I find this to be rather non-intuitive.  Is there a
> reason why GnuCash doesn't just open the double-clicked GnuCash file?
>  Is there a reason why it is so obsessed with the last opened file?
> 
> Ron

Hi,

This is indeed a known problem with the Mac OS X port of gnucash. That port will ignore the 
file you double-click on in the finder. That is a technical issue which John can no doubt better 
explain if you're interested.

I would expect however that when you close the "whine" dialog as you call it, you should be 
able to choose File->Open directly to select the new file, instead of first saving and opening 
the dummy window. Is that not the case ?

Regards,

Geert


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