[GNC] OFX/qfx Downloads from American Express

[Tom Teixeira]

On 1/1/20 2:15 PM, David Carlson wrote:
> It seems that American Express and Intuit software are colluding on a new
> method of downloading ofx/qfx format files from American Express.  They
> have changed the format so that, according to their website, one needs to
> Deactivate Online Banking Services for a Quicken Account, then Reactivate
> Online Banking Services for a Quicken Account in order to get a clean
> download.  Since we do not have Quicken accounts, this will probably fail
> for us.  It appears that this process will probably spread to all financial
> institutions that support qfx downloads via a license with Intuit
> software.  American Express also supports CSV format, so I am now trying
> that method.
>
> If others have run into this problem and found a solution to make ofx/qfx
> work with this new interference, please post your experience here.
>
> I have noticed that while CSV is short for Comma Separated Values, many CSV
> files use a different separator, and some require text to be enclosed with
> quotes.  Fortunately, the GnuCash CSV importer tolerates these anomalies.
>
I saw the notice about deactivating/reactivating online banking but
assumed that the ofx/qfx has no equivalent to deactivate/reactivate.
However, importing the resulting qfx file no longer works. Opening the
file with a text editor shows some very different headers, and the file
is now pure XML:

    <?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?><?OFX OFXHEADER="200"
    VERSION="202" SECURITY="NONE" OLDFILEUID="NONE"
    NEWFILEUID="NONE"?><OFX
    xmlns:ns2="http://ofx.net/types/2003/04"><SIGNONMSGSRSV1><SONRS><STATUS><CODE>0</CODE><SEVERITY>INFO</SEVERITY><MESSAGE>Login
    Successful!</MESSAGE></STATUS>

Compared with older qfx files where the files began:

    OFXHEADER:100
    DATA:OFXSGML
    VERSION:102
    SECURITY:NONE
    ENCODING:USASCII
    CHARSET:1252
    COMPRESSION:NONE
    OLDFILEUID:NONE
    NEWFILEUID:NONE

So it looks like both the OFXHEADER and VERSION have changed. I tried
looking at some of the source for the OFX library on github and saw that
at least some version 2 of OFX is supported, but don't know how to
proceed beyond that: I use gnucash binary packages, not compiling my
own. One code snippet I saw showed the code does ad hoc parsing and had
some special code to allow for an XML element to have attributes. I see
the version 202 file has proper closing tags for many elements (such as
</CODE> and </SEVERITY>) that are missing in the version 102 file.