[GNC] AQbanking Amex OFX Download Badly Broken

[Alan]

Tried the Aqbanking section on GnuCash 3.10 with my Amex account. It was
encouraging to see the latest version of Aqbanking now recognizes the content in
the OFX download (last broken version could only read the headers). Was about to
congratulate the development team, but then I noticed something very wrong with
the few hundred transactions I had just loaded into GnuCash.

 

None of the payees matched anything that could be matched up with any previously
entered, downloaded and audited transactions. Closer inspection revealed
something very wrong, and repeated on every transaction record downloaded.

 

I compared individual transactions in my Aqbanking debug log to the ones that
GnuCash had downloaded. GnuCash apparently concatenated each memo field followed
by a space, followed by the transaction payee name. None of the downloaded data
ended up in a valid transaction memo field. This is badly broken, and totally
unusable.

 

I examined the debug log to see how well Aqbanking has been communicating with
the bank. Headers show the session established and completed properly.
Transaction records and fields were being presented correctly, amounts were
correctly associated with the real payees, and Amex was proving a fully formed
payee name <NAME> followed by a fully formed memo field <MEMO>. The transaction
ID number was also transferred consistently in the <REFNUM> field, though
GnuCash appears to be ignoring it.

 

Someone had to go to a lot of trouble to do this, rather than just place each
usable transaction field data into the closest matching ledger fields (even the
transaction ID can be useful for simple dupe checking). That's all that we're
looking for. Download the data, populate the record fields, and get back to
business.

 

So I'm at a total loss how anyone could have deliberately taken clearly defined
fields and data (that should easily match the "Description" and "Notes" fields
within GnuCash account ledgers), and pretty much destroy them, along with the
user data sets that also have to be deleted and recreated.