Christopher Browne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 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.
This is an interesting idea, but I think it may be better done as an
additional export feature rather than as a replacement for built-in
reports. I think that for the standard user reports, we should go
with the "scheme dumps to html widget (or whatever)" approach.
Aside from other reasons, if we went strictly with the gnumeric
approach, then we can't do things that may be really useful like
interactive reports. The user should be able to click on a line item
in the report and jump to the transaction, perhaps we could even
support right-clicking to pull up a menu that will let you pick which
end of the transaction you want to jump to, etc.
I can imagine that we'll want to do the same thing for graphs once we
get that off the ground.
All that said, generating XML for gnumeric should really be pretty
easy, either from scheme or from C.
--
Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
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