Easier custom reporting (maybe Lua)?

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 23, 2016, at 8:53 AM, Sébastien de Menten <sdementen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Would it be feasible in gnucash to use the guile/scheme report system to call an external process (a command line program) that would return the proper html to display in the report ? 
> The external program could take arguments generated by the options system of the report (the GUI that is used to customize a report). 
> If so, we could have a more open system for report generation. Piecash could be used by pythoneers but others could use a mix of sql + any external program to build reports.
> 
> Does this make sense ? Or are there blocking issues I am not aware of ?
> 
> 

Yes, it's possible: The quote retrieval code works by calling a perl program, gnc-fq-helper, from Scheme. We'd need someone fluent in Scheme to write the external interface code. Such a report wouldn't have access to the in-memory state of the database, though, so it would be current only with the SQL backend or a freshly-saved XML file. 

Regards,
John Ralls