Re: Generic Transaction import discussion

[John F Meinel Jr]

I had a question about the transaction importing capabilities. I'm working with freecoins (a free account manager for the Palm OS), and I was wanting to make it sync with gnucash. I know I've mentioned it before, but I wanted to give my general background.

The question is, if you already have a listing of files in double-entry bookkeeping, what is the best way to get them imported into gnucash. As far as I'm aware, the only import mechanism is QIF files. And from the discussions I've been reading, and from what I've read about the QIF spec [albeit not a lot], they don't support that style. You just have simple transactions [not linked to another transaction].

We've been able to create an XML file that gnucash will read as a 'real' gnucash account file, however, I don't believe there is a way to merge these transactions with another account. Is there plans to do this? Is it planned but won't happen for some time? I'm willing to scratch an itch here, except what I saw in the qif import, it was written in Scheme, and I don't know enough about functional languages to make it work. I'm pretty good in C/C++, a little bit of Java, etc, but I'm an engineer, not a comp sci major :).

The basic goal would be a program that takes the database files from freecoins, tries to import them into gnucash [possibly with user help], and then removes everything except account summaries, and possibly the last few weeks [adjustable] worth of transactions.

Am I going to have to work with an XML parser and manually change the gnucash account file? That sounds like a good way to break a lot of stuff. Is there a simple method for importing an XML file instead of a QIF file? Do QIF files support splits and I'm just not aware of it?

Any answers would be appreciated.
John
=:->

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