[GNC] OFX import sometimes loses transaction memos

[David Carlson]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 1:15 AM Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
wrote:

> Op donderdag 17 januari 2019 06:33:25 CET schreef David Carlson:
> > I think that I need to spend more time examining the transactions that
> had
> > their memos dropped during import to see if I can find a threshold string
> > length, then file a bug report asking for a short term fix truncating
> > strings rather than dropping them, and a long term fix accepting up to
> the
> > 256 character max and truncating after that.
> >
> > David C
>
> I don't think there should be one. Some time back I submitted a number of
> patches to handle long strings in the ofx library. IIRC it internally uses
> a
> fixed-length buffer to read parts of the ofx file. And I believe that
> buffer
> itself was already 1024 characters long. So at least for lines (including
> tags) of that size there should not be a problem. Next if the buffer gets
> full
> before a full tag contents could be read, it simply fills that buffer a
> second
> time and appends that contents to the same first string. So in principle
> you
> can have text messages of unlimited size.
>
> Now there were bugs in that area, and my patches were partly to resolve
> those.
> IIRC one issue was if the ofx file didn't have newlines between tags that
> buffer handling would not always work as it should.
>
> Note those changes have gone into a recent libofx release. As it's been a
> while I don't know whether gnucash 2.6.x was ever packaged for Windows
> with
> this more recent release though I'm sure gnucash 3.x is.
>
> And of course there may be other bugs that weren't reported yet. I'm not
> using
> ofx myself.
>
> Lastly it's probably still interesting to run ofxdump as it can help
> determine
> whether the issue already starts in the libofx library or rather that
> gnucash
> messes up the data it received from libofx.
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert
>
>
>
I was not aware that release 3.4 might behave better.  I have not tried it
yet for other reasons.  This is good news.

I think that  i mentioned that my test files do not have carriage returns,
line feeds or newlines, instead preceeding the less than symbols with 15
space characters.
I did not mention that they also contain transactions belonging to several
different bank accounts within the same OFX file.

I shall be sure to include a sanitized test file when I submit my bug
report.

Aside:  I have discovered quite by accident that the keyboard on this
tablet has a Ctrl key that actually works to help manipulate a buffer.  It
is still tricky to insert text after or in the middle of the previous
reply.  I think it worked! 😊

Now if I can learn how to override the spell checker when it is wrong....

David C



>