[GNC] was: Rethinking the placeholder account concept Re: Fwd: The two modules

[Geert Janssens]

Op donderdag 28 juni 2018 22:48:16 CEST schreef D:
> On June 28, 2018, at 1:12 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> 
wrote:
> >Op donderdag 28 juni 2018 18:47:18 CEST schreef Stephen M. Butler:
> [Snip]
> 
> >> Maybe the financial folks can band together to get the developers to
> >> enforce no-transactions to a parent account.
> >
> >I think we should modify the concepts. "Placeholder" is ambiguous and for
> >the lack of a better solution is has been abused to make existing accounts
> >read- only.I
> 
> I am under the impression that the placeholder setting is only meant to make
> an account read-only, so saying that users have "abused" this seems
> incorrect. We've used the tool we've been given.

"Abused" was probably a poor choice of words. I meant no offense. I merely 
wanted to clarify the "placeholder" feature is IMO used in ways it was not 
initially intended.

If it was only meant be make an account read-only, it would have been named 
"read only" :)

It was named "placeholder" though and IMO it was originally intended to be 
used for hierarchical organization of accounts. I even guess it was a design 
oversight that an account with transactions could be made a placeholder. This 
oversight made it a convenient proxy for marking an account a placeholder 
account. And it looks like it's even the more common and promoted use case 
right now.

I'm completely fine with that in itself.

On the other hand the double use of this option is causing unnecessary 
confusion which is why I am proposing to clear this out somewhere in the 
future.

> >Perhaps it's time to introduce a "View" type account which is only used to
> >structure the account tree (and as aggregate account in reports) and next
> >to that introduce a read-only attribute to normal accounts. Placeholder
> >could then be phased out in favor of these two. We could even try to
> >automate this using some heuristics:
> >- if a placeholder account has no transactions, convert it into a view
> >account - if a placeholder account does have transactions, make it
> >read-only instead. Add in an informational message to the user about what
> >was done so the user can make corrections if needed (like adding view
> >accounts if an account was being used for both functions).
> >Geert
> 
> You might even call a View account "Closed," or are there other reasons an
> account might behave this way?
> 
That's not what I meant with "View". The way I intend this is it's not even 
really an account. It's merely an element that helps organize the account 
hierarchy. Closed to me suggests it can also be "open" under other conditions. 
It can't. It's permanently empty and won't ever take any splits. The only 
property it has is it's balance which is the sum of all its children's 
balances. Internally this is a calculated value though, not stored. But that's 
a technical detail.

> I'd also add that eliminating these accounts from drop down controls should
> go along with the changes, but assume that would be implied from the fact
> that Placeholder accounts don't appear there currently.

Agreed. A structural "view" account would only serve in the global account 
hierarchy and on reports. As one can't use them to store splits, they never 
make sense in dropdowns.

Geert