[GNC] GNUCash XML format compatibility

[Colin Law]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2020 at 15:21, Wirawan Purwanto <wirawan0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi David, thanks for clarification. For every major release (either
> 2.x or 3.x series), is there a guarantee for file format
> compatibility?

Upwards, yes I believe so.  Any migration necessary would be handled
by gnucash itself.  There is no guarantee that a 3.x file will work in
2.x though in practice it may be ok.

Colin

>
> Wirawan
>
> On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 11:21 PM David Carlson
> <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > According to the developers, the only pre-3.x version of GnuCash that is expected to read data files that have been touched by a 3.x version is release 2.6.21, possibly with a suffix depending on the OS it is run in.  When a file is first touched by 3.x there are some unspecified changes that may be at least partially mentioned in other threads here.  They do not specify if there are any changes in the database variations, but there probably are.
> >
> > David Carlson
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 9:08 PM Wirawan Purwanto <wirawan0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I wonder if anyone has a pointer on the changes in Gnucash XML format
> >> that can cause incompatibility across program versions. I have a
> >> scenario where one OS uses Gnucash 2.6.x series whereas the other uses
> >> 3.5. I am concerned when transporting data file back and forth, if
> >> there is corruption due to incompatible file format.
> >>
> >> In my recent trial to migrate files back and forth between 2.6 and
> >> 3.5, I noted that data seems to be intact. But in the 2.6 series, the
> >> "cmdty:space" field has the value of "ISO4217" whereas in 3.5 it was
> >> "CURRENCY". But I noted that a very old GNUCash version (2.4.10)
> >> failed to read the dates correctly from the file that was saved by
> >> 3.5. All dates became "1969-12-31" when read in the 2.4 program.
> >> Because of this I am not quite sure what is safe to do or not safe.
> >> Would be nice if there is a prominent / easy-to-find web page which
> >> tells end-user like me regarding file version incompatibility.
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