[GNC] Accounts Payable payment entry is marked as an Invoice

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

On Mon, November 22, 2021 10:43 pm, D. via gnucash-user wrote:
> Seems to me a bad design decision to allow a user to have UI access to
> change things one way, but not the other. It is also bad user design to
> allow users to change things in an account that will always break when the
> user changes anything, something that's been true for as long as I've used
> gnucash.

The issue is that there are real valid reasons to ensure a user can still
modify the AR/AP accounts (specifically, there are reasons to allow them
to delete Payment and, more importantly, INTER-LOT transactions (the
latter being solely between lots within AR/AP, so they don't exist outside
AR/AP).

This means you can't just make the account a placeholder, because there
are valid reasons to be able to "edit" the account.

Cross that with the lack of a display-only cell type.  There is data we
want to show (I/P/?) but really don't want to allow the user to edit it --
but there's not a data cell that *does* that.

At the time, when I implemented this nearly 20 years ago, I decided to
just go with the same cell used for the reconcile flag because it was the
*closest* to what I wanted. You cannot tab into the cell.  It only changes
if you *mouse-click* in the cell.  So the chance of someone accidentally
doing so was (and I maintain still is) relatively low.

The "real" fix would be to create a new, read-only label cell that could
be used.

I suppose another way to fix it would be to change the logic of when a
transaction is read-only, but I am sure I had reasons for doing it the way
I did -- I just don't recall them all right now.

> It would be better to make the account a placeholder account by default,
> and rewrite the business logic to push the changes into the account
> despite the placeholder setting, but I imagine that's a lot of work, and
> the people who know how to do the work will explain why my ideas are no
> good.

See above for why this is a bad idea.  I tried it (making the whole
register read-only) and it made more problems than it solved.

> David

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant