A thought that comes to mind is to push reporting out to a separate
process, let's say, a spreadsheet package. Let's say, Gnumeric.
This diminishes *dramatically* the complexity of what needs to be in
the main GnuCash program.
In more detail...
- Have GnuCash generate output in the form of a spreadsheet.
- Perhaps this could use the XML data format used by Gnumeric, hmmm...
- GnuCash would then have a *not-driven-by-source-code-intimacy*
dependancy on Gnumeric.
Note that this would solely mean having an XML generator as a part of
Gnumeric, which is not a particularly onerous thing; this mandates
*no* libraries, *no* APIs, nothing overtly nasty to integrate.
It only mandates creating a file. If there were a library, it would be
one that GnuCash would *create,* not one that it would need to depend on
from elsewhere.
Note that this has the added merit that the data that gets pushed out gets
pushed out in the form of reported numbers, rather than as a "dumb" HTML
table. In other words, the spreadsheet can then be manipulated further,
with financial data remaining as financial data.
That is much better than getting output as an HTML table, where really
the only thing you can do with that is to display it or print it, and
"cut/paste" isn't terribly meaningful.
I am quite serious here; note that GnuCash is coming close to requiring
GNOME, which means that requiring Gnumeric requires few if any additional
dependancies.
Heading to "woo-woo" land would be to create something like the Excel
notion of "pivot tables," where one spreadsheet would contain detailed
data, and another sheet would allow there to be different "views" of
this data. That's something that Gnumeric doesn't presently support,
which is arguably a *bug* in Gnumeric, which I have reported, but which
has thus far been ignored...
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