On Aug 15, 2018, at 10:34 AM, Adrien Monteleone
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Aug 15, 2018, at 12:11 PM, David T. <[email protected]> wrote:
On Aug 15, 2018, at 10:02 AM, Adrien Monteleone
<[email protected]> wrote:
But it’s not a ‘plain file’ as it is XML formatted. Someone expecting
plain text and trying to view it is going to be met with tag soup
they’ve never seen before and might very well not know how to read it.
Not to mention that it’s compressed.
True, forgot about that. Certainly, they’ll see gibberish mostly.
It also carries an .xml extension. So specifying the format is very
specific and informative, even for users who aren’t familiar with XML.
They’ll see in their file manager the extension, and/or the OS’s
interpretation of the file type itself. (in this case both XML)
However, the file extension used is “gnucash” and not “xml”
Facepalm. I forgot about that. (I honestly rarely even look at the
location where it’s stored anyway) I’d suspect unless Win10 uses the
file descriptor for file type instead of the extension as was the
practice through at least Win7, then no, those users won’t see XML
anywhere. (if the descriptor is set as XML that is)
So I just checked on both MacOS and Ubuntu, MacOS reports the ‘Kind’ as
‘Gnucash Document’ regardless if sqlite or xml, and at least with xml,
Ubuntu reports the file type as ’spreadsheet’. (yes, it’s registered to
open with GnuCash, but this was built from source, so perhaps the file
type was not registered properly, repo versions may vary)
So I guess on that point I was way off.
Perhaps the save process needs to be refactored to identify clearly and
separately the name of the data file AND its format?
Since .gnucash is not really proprietary or somehow a special format
from XML then I agree, the extension should be .xml.
Combine this with the fact that the sqlite version of the file ALSO uses
the .gnucash extension can make for some confusion. At a glance, you
can’t tell what the format is. You can’t even tell until you try to open
it with something other than GnuCash. (or you notice that GnuCash
doesn’t offer a Save option) The only reason I know which is which is I
had to use filename.xml.gnucash to tell them apart. That’s a usability
bug in my opinion. I don’t know how hard that is to change, but I’d
support the move.
On that note, the documentation somewhere (I suppose in the ‘file >
save/save as’ section) should document that the extension is currently
‘.gnucash’. A new user shouldn’t have to go to a wiki or website FAQ
after reading the documentation for something this basic.
Would it be out of order to include in your table that both use this
extension? If you expand the table to show MySQL and Postgres, I suppose
that row would have some other note since their data stores are very
different than single files. (though in this case they might store it
that way, I haven’t used either to know)
Regards,
Adrien
Knowing this might very well help them find their file if they know
the format they are looking for.
But I do agree, the documentation should cover where files are stored.
Ideally, this should be made part of the Help or Guide in the Getting
Started section. It is certainly a common enough issue on the list.
Regards,
Adrien
On Aug 15, 2018, at 10:24 AM, Christoph R
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi David,
The default file storage format is XML
I would not call this “XML" but "plain file”. From a user perspective
it is not important in which internal format it is stored. But it
makes a big difference if it is a simple file created by Gnucash or
if Gnucash needs to connect to a DBMS.
And one of the biggest confusion for users on the mailing list is the
question: “Where is my data?”. Pointing out that all your accounts
and transactions are in a simple file might reduce that problem.
Cheers,
Christoph
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