Easier custom reporting (maybe Lua)?

Mike or Penny Novack mpnovack at mtdata.com
Tue Oct 25 10:27:40 EDT 2016


I will add something here related to that "easier" and that developers 
have pointed out that putting in a facility to call an external process 
open (serious) security holes.

If it is the case that an existing report from gnucash CONTAINS the data 
needed for the desired report << but not formatted the way you need, 
contains extra data that you don;t need/want, etc.) then the EASY way to 
do this is outside of gnucash. In other words, have gnucash produce the 
report, export that, and with the custom program you write edit that to 
what you want. Why "easy"? Because of TESTING. No matter what errors you 
have in this editing program you write, gnucash itself cannot be 
affected. You do NOT have to test that the changes you made do not 
affect gnucash because they can't.

The only time you should be asking for a change WITHIN gnucash is when 
none of the gnucash reports contain the necessary data. Even here should 
first consider if more than one report collectively contain that data 
since your program could maybe be written to take in data from two files 
(two exported reports) to produce the report that is desired.

Michael D Novack


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