Welcome! Might I suggest you're overthinking it? Symlinks would be fine. On Sunday, August 20, 2023 at 10:31:10 PM UTC-7 kdd39...@gmail.com wrote:
> I’m relatively new to Beancount and I’m working on setting up my ledgers. > I’ve encountered an issue related to document directives when dealing with > different devices. Here’s a breakdown of my situation and the potential > solutions I’ve considered: > > - I have started writing my importers for filing various statements > (using the beangulp framework). > - As part of the import, I’d like to extract and output a document > directive. > - I am using document directives as opposed to the option "documents" > "PathToRoot" because I’d like to add metadata to the document > directive entries. > > Problem > > Beancount Document directives > <https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.html#documents> > have the following construct: YYYY-MM-DD document Account "PathToDocument" > . > > Let us assume that we have two users, Joe and Alice, who run a shared > ledger that is kept on GitHub. They store their statements and other > document files on a shared OneDrive folder that is synced to each users > computer. > > *Alice’s file organization:* > /home/alice/ |-- OneDrive |-- documents |-- stmts |-- Liabilities |-- > CreditCard |-- apr-2014.pdf |-- etc., |-- remotes |-- ledger |-- > main.beancount > > *Joe’s file organization:* > /home/joe/ |-- OneDrive |-- documents |-- stmts |-- Liabilities |-- > CreditCard |-- apr-2014.pdf |-- etc., |-- remotes |-- ledger |-- > main.beancount > > If Joe files the apr-2014.pdf statement, he would enter the following > into main.beancount: > 2013-11-03 document Liabilities:CreditCard > "/home/joe/OneDrive/documents/stmts/apr-2014.pdf" > > On Alice’s computer, however, this would be the incorrect file path. For > Alice, the entry should read: > 2013-11-03 document Liabilities:CreditCard > "/home/alice/OneDrive/documents/stmts/apr-2014.pdf" > > This causes issues and prevents the Alice and Joe from being able to use > the ledgers properly (bean-check will fail since the file is not found). > Potential Solutions > > I have tried to do some research on how one might address this issue. I > have come upon three potential options: > > 1. > > *Use relative paths* > > Instead of entering the absolute path, use a relative path such that > the document directive becomes: > 2013-11-03 document Liabilities:CreditCard > "../../OneDrive/documents/stmts/apr-2014.pdf" > > This looks like it would work, provided Alice and Joe keep their > documents in the exact same place relative to the ledger file. That seems > a > bit fragile and not so elegant. > 2. > > *Use a symlinked folder* > > Each user could add a symlinked documents folder into the main ledger > folder, for example: > |-- remotes |-- ledger |-- main.beancount |-- documents --> > /home/joe/OneDrive/documents > > This solution seems better, since it allows each user to specify their > own folder path. > 3. > > *Run a pre-processing script* > > Each user could run a pre-processing script on the ledger files to > replace a set of placeholder variables with the locally configured > variables. The updated file would then become the input to the beancount > parser. For example: > 2013-11-03 document Liabilities:CreditCard > "$DOCUMENT_PATH/stmts/apr-2014.pdf" > > This could work, but it introduces an additional layer of complexity, > as users would need to run this script before parsing the ledger file. > > Question > > What I would like to know is: > > 1. > > Are there any alternative options that I have failed to consider here? > > For example, is there the chance that Beancount itself could recognise > a configuration variable that represents the root documents directory? > Could this be declared as an option in the main ledger file? > 2. > > If there are no other possibilities, does anyone have any advice on > which approach is best? > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/1466dfb8-0267-4330-a0e3-cbfe6a42a7b6n%40googlegroups.com.
