[GNC] Transaction ordering on num field

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 9, 2021, at 11:40 PM, flywire <flywire0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> How can special customisation to sort a GnuCash field be justified when it
> makes future transitions even more difficult? This field should be sorted in
> a standard way. It's clearly the old *numeric* field for sorting cheques,
> and the banks tell us cheques are as good as dead. When it was changed to
> alphanumeric the sort order should have changed too, ie 10 before 2.
> 
> I note David's comment on current functionality. Significant changes should
> occur at major versions.

None of my banks have told me that checks are dead, though I certainly try to write as few as possible these days. Regardless, my books go back 25 years and have lots of check numbers in them. The num filed has always been a free string, you can put whatever you want in it, but the sort is a very simple comparison of calls to a C standard library function (atoi) that converts leading digits to numbers.

The whole point of this thread is to find out if anyone thinks this is a significant change. I guess you do, so please explain in detail, including whether it actually affects your use of GnuCash and if so how.

Regards,
John Ralls