info about action field in double-line view

[Geert Janssens]

Op maandag 22 januari 2018 17:30:32 CET schreef David T.:
> Geert,
> 
> What is the current status on the File Association feature set? I know that
> there was a wave of activity a few years back when the feature was first
> added, but I haven’t seen anything about it since. My recollection of the
> traffic at the time was that it had potential to be very useful, but that
> after the initial basic implementation, additional work to enhance its
> utility was lacking.
> 
> As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the documentation about file
> associations, either. At the very least, it would be good to have some kind
> of state-of-the-feature information put out there somewhere, maybe on the
> wiki, if the feature isn’t yet ready for general use.
> 
> David
> 

David,

I think the file association feature is currently pretty basic, but useful.

The most common complaints about the initial implementation were
- the lack of an indication of whether a file was associated with it or not
- a way to remove an existing association

The former has been fixed in 2.6 already, the latter was implemented for the 
upcoming 3.0 release.

By checking this, I find the option to remove an association hidden too far 
away, so it may need another revision in the future. Currently to remove an 
existing association one has to select "Associate File with transaction" a 
second time. The file dialog that pops up will now have an additional "Remove" 
button to remove the existing association.


Future potential improvements I can think of:
- Make removing a file association more visible.
- Show a file icon instead of "F"/"U". While a no-brainer from a usability 
point of view it would require huge changes in the current register code, so 
it's unlikely to be implemented anytime soon unfortunately.
- Provide an option to store a copy of the associated file near the gnucash 
file. I don't know what the best equivalent would be in case the gnucash data 
is stored in a database. We may have to store it as a binary blob in that 
case. The primary use case here would be to prevent the association being 
moved or deleted from underneath gnucash, or in case of the db backend, to 
make the association available to all gnucash clients interacting with the db.
- Make file associations more universally useful: allow them to be associated 
with invoices, bills, vendors, customers,...


Regards,

Geert