[GNC] Changes to transaction entry, and quirks

[Adrien Monteleone]

David,

It sounds like the entire issue is related to the new suggester.

I'd hazard the really old templates are showing up due to spelling 
issues as you noted at the end of your post.

As to how to work around that till it is improved, I'm not sure.

I'm using this new feature as a means to correct old spellings at the 
moment as a cleanup. I'd suspect that would likely avoid the issues you 
are seeing, but of course, that's just a bit too OCD for some, and 
certainly not practical if you have a decade or more of transactions in 
a book.

There have been many requests over the years to be able to edit 
Descriptions independently as a list. That may or may not be useful here 
if it is ever implemented.

Until then:

If I'm not mistaken, typing a space (or maybe two) after an undesired 
suggestion should abandon that suggestion and enable 'new' entries 
without auto-complete. You'd have to do this without tabbing through an 
undesired suggestion. Of course, that means you lose auto-complete from 
a recent entry too, but it doesn't look like you were able to get it 
work right for now anyway.

Regards,
Adrien

On 5/1/23 2:28 PM, David T. via gnucash-user wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am not sure exactly what changes have been implemented in the transaction entry logic, but I've begun seeing GnuCash offer me ancient transactions as templates for current data entry. So, instead of giving me a recent transaction, I end up with a transaction from 12 years ago.
> 
>  From the prompt, it's not possible to know that this is happening before accepting the suggestion; once accepted, I have to cancel the transaction and start over-- if I notice that the transaction is wrong! Moreover, since almost everything in my financial world has changed during my use of GnuCash, I am finding that I accidentally put transactions into unplanned and inappropriate accounts. This is even more troubling since I've found that GnuCash will add these transactions despite the destination accounts being placeholder accounts.
> 
> I am pretty sure that this didn't happen in earlier versions, but I'm known to be wrong more often than not.
> 
> Short of splitting my file apart (which I'm loath to do), is there any way to alter the suggestion list so that it doesn't offer me outdated transactions? Can I delete entries from the list? Can I tell it not to use transactions that involve placeholder accounts?
> 
> And on a related note, I've found that the suggester does not always respect different character strings, and will conflate different strings into one transaction. What I mean is this: I previously entered a transaction with the description "Payment- Credit Card" (note the spacing with the hyphen).  This transaction transferred money to an account that is now a placeholder account. I now prefer "Payment - Credit Card" (again, note the spacing with the hyphen). When I type "Payment -" with the preceding space, I *should* get the new version of the transaction (and that is what displays in the prompt)-- but when I tab out of the field, the *old* transaction gets inserted instead of the new. I don't understand how this happens, but it has happened numerous times for me.