How To Stop GnuCash from Saying It Cannot Find a Specific File

[DaveC49]

Dear Bored Accountant

 I would challenge your assumption that the approach used in Audacity for
deleting files is necessarily an example of best practice or even more
importantly appropriate for a software packege of the nature of Gnucash. 

I have just checked five major programs I use regularly (LibreOffice,
FreeCAD, PHPStorm IDE, NetbeansIDE, Scilab, Google Earth) and none of them
provides facilities for deleting files in their main File menu item and all
rely on the user, if they require to delete files, doing it using the
operating system facilities. This is in many ways a safety feature, as it
require a deliberate action on the part of the user to delete a file.
Deleting from a menu way be appropriate in a data manipulation program like
Audacity where one might make changes, save them and then decide they are
not useful and require an inprogram method to remove the files.

In an accounting package a data file may store several years worth of data
and safety of that data is a much higher priority than the ability to easily
delete user files which is generally an infrequent occurrence (except when
you are initially learning Gnucash perhaps). 

With regard to the recent files list, how is a program to know thatsuch a
list should be modified, if a file is deleted outside of the program's
control, e.g. by the operating system. Audacity (2.0.5) by the way has no
facility for deleting files from within the program. The program only knows
that that file is not available to load, which it reports to the user rather
than just crashing (that would be bad programming). 

It is certainly a nice feature to remove files from the recent list, if they
can't be found to load. Even nicer to be able to first adjust the file
location to a new location, if the files were moved for example, before
deleting it. The priority afforded to this will depend whether this
operation is something one does regularly or infrequently and the latter is
generally the case when using Gnucash. It is relatively easy to open the
file in its new location and it will then appear in the list. 

I would suggest that rather than bad programming, the lack of a delete
feature within Gnucash is a deliberate design choice. The retention of the
file name in the list of recently used files is also potentially useful. If
the file is not found, and had been moved, you at least know the exact name
of the file you are looking for. If the warning popup has disappeared and
the filename deleted, which file are you trying to find? Remember it may be
several years since you created the file and if you are not a user who uses
multiple files, you may not even remember what the filename is.

David Cousens



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