[GNC] Can one save report option defaults?

[john]

> On May 4, 2022, at 7:49 AM, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 04, 2022 at 09:36:19AM -0500, David Carlson wrote:
>> On Wed, May 4, 2022 at 9:32 AM Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> I find I nearly always change the same five or six report options
>>> every time I want a new report.  For example I nearly always want to
>>> select all accounts (at least initially) and I want the secondary sort
>>> key to be Date.
>>> 
>>> Is there any way I can set up GnuCash so the report options always
>>> start with the values I want?
>>> 
>> At the top of the report there is a button labelled "Save Config/"
>> 
> Yes, I know that.  However it only saves the settings for one report
> and when you retrieve it you get exactly the report you saved.  What I
> want is to be able to save the more general report settings so that
> whenever I open a new report I get those settings.
> 
> There's already a few things that can be configured 'system wide' in
> Edit->Preferences->Reports, for example you can set the default
> currency for *every* report there.  I'd like to be able to set more
> things like this so that they apply to every report. Then I won't have
> to set/unset the same half-dozen or so things I have to change every
> time I create a new report.  The problem is that I sometimes forget
> some of them! :-)


The report option defaults are hard-coded in the report code. That design makes it impractical to add a lot of customizations to the preferences system. The route to custom report option defaults is custom reports: You can copy those files (in the sources in gnucash/report/reports/standard) edit the defaults to your liking and install them as custom reports, see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Custom_Reports <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Custom_Reports> for detailed instructions.

But you can also get there with saved configurations too, because you can open a saved configuration, change some options, and save that as a new saved configuration. You'll need to work out a naming convention if you have a lot of them so that you can easily find the one you want in the saved config dialog.

Regards,
John Ralls