[GNC] Risks of merging xml save files

[Patrick James]

While I suspect that it's possible to stitch XML files together, this is not something I recommend.

What I do recommend is exporting the transactions using the CSV export tool from one and import into the permanent book.


> On 08/31/2026 8:41 PM PDT Raymond Maass <raymondbarrettsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> Hi, all.
> 
> Loving Gnucash -- thanks so much for all the development and maintenance to
> help make it what it is.
> 
> TL;DR -- Are GUID's for elements (e.g. transactions/splits) in the
> xml-formatted save files generated and used such that they are required to
> be anything other than simple unique identifiers? I'm not sure if this
> makes sense, but I'm worried that, in addition to being unique identifiers,
> they may also serve as some sort of check-sum for consistency like I
> believe git commits do.
> 
> A few more details:
> I'd like to be able to have my wife and me both able to interact with our
> joint gnucash file via a hosted git repository as a way to
> (a) track history with a bit more detail than the auto-generated backup
> files
> (b) allow us to both work on the same file
> 
> So far, I set gnucash on our two separate computers to each save as xml
> without compression, making the git diffs quite readable and enabling merge
> conflict resolution to merge changes back into the main branch when
> conflicts arise.
> 
> When we have both done some basic work (e.g. entering some transactions),
> and then want to merge our files, it is generally a relatively
> straightforward process of making sure all the transactions in the xml file
> are present in the resulting file. We could also update the transaction
> count that is stored in the file, but I've found so far that leaving that
> not updated doesn't seem to cause problems (making me wonder what it is
> there for).
> 
> I've done a few basic tests where I take a simple file and carry out that
> workflow, then reopen the merged file in Gnucash. So far, the result always
> seems to be as expected with all separately entered transactions present.
> 
> So my question is whether anyone sees any potential issues with this. One
> particular worry that came to mind is about the GUID's in the file. Each
> transaction and sub-component like the split lines has a GUID. When I merge
> the files, I simply copy the corresponding lines for each transaction into
> the merged file with whatever GUID was made on the branch.
> 
> Are the GUIDs generated and subsequently used in any way that might cause
> consistency problems later such as a checksum of the save file at the state
> they were added? Or am I okay as long as they're all unique, even if they
> were generated and manually merged from, effectively, two different gnucash
> files (from branches)?
> 
> Bonus question:
> Is there a particular algorithm for generating valid GUID's, or can they be
> any (unique) valid string with the allowed characters? I'm somewhat
> interested in the idea of programmatically adding elements to the xml file,
> and this would be a consideration in doing so.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ray
> _______________________________________________