[GNC] How to bulk import about 130 Securities entries?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, folks:

I am a long-time GnuCash user, and for all those years I have pretty 
much not attempted to track my investments in GnuCash. But now I want to 
start.  My first goal is to import many years of past activity.

I have downloaded the transactions from my brokerage account as a CSV 
file. The first thing I get out of this is the name and symbol of about 
130 securities. I am wondering if there is a practical way to bulk 
import these into GnuCash. That is, instead of visiting Tools -- 
Security Editor, and pressing the Add button 130 times, and filling out 
the "New security" dialogue 130 times, is there a more efficient path?

Looking at the File… Import menu, I do not see an option to import 
Securities. Looking at the documentation, wiki, and list archives, I 
don't see a mention of this. Is there some bulk import mechanism I am 
overlooking?

I took a look at the uncompressed XML contents of a new, simple .gnucash 
book file. It appears that the data entered in the "New security" 
dialogue gets stored as <gnc:commodity> entities. There appears to be a 
pretty simple relationship between the fields of the dialogue and the 
text within the <gnc:commodity> entity. The entities are stored in a 
certain order, sorted by <cmdty:space> then <cmdty:id>. There is a 
<gnc:count-data cd:type="commodity"> entity which seems to contain a 
text count of the non-CURRENCY gnc:commodity entries.

This makes me wonder if I could transform my list of 130 security names 
and symbols into <gnc:commodity> entities, and insert them into the 
GnuCash XML of my book.

Are there complexities or pitfalls about this approach which I might be 
overlooking?  We can certainly stipulate that manipulating the XML 
content directly is unsupported and risky, I must be careful and keep 
backups, I might blow off my fingers, etc.  For what it's worth, I 
believe that I am pretty proficient with editing XML, processing CSV 
files, and scripting manipulations of text data.

Once I have the securities added to the book, I then need to add the 
appropriate child accounts to my brokerage accounts, each denominated in 
the appropriate security type and symbol. It looks like that is 
straightforward to do with a CSV of accounts in the correct format, and 
the File… Import…  Import Accounts from CSV… menu item. I have a few 
child accounts which I entered from the UI which will serve as 
examples.  Is there any way in which this is more difficult than it looks?

Cheers,
      —Jim "ADBE ALNIX AOL … VUG VWO ZTD81" DeLaHunt