Clark Jones writes:
> Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> >
> > Christopher Browne writes:
> > > On Wed, 27 Sep 2000 10:46:27 +1000, the world broke into rejoicing as
> [...]
> > > ... And in perhaps-overly-brief response to the multiply-expressed
> > > question,
> > > "What if it's not a tree?"
> [...]
> > As for the user interface question, ideas are rolling around in the
> > back of the head, but you're right, it is *nasty*.
>
> Well, I have a thought on this, but first let me explain, briefly, my
> situation: I have two vehicles, a pickup and an RV, and so have things
> like
>
> auto:pickup:insurance
> auto:pickup:repairs
> auto:pickup:taxes
> auto:RV:insurance
> auto:RV:repairs
> auto:RV:taxes
>
> and I have
>
> home:insurance
> home:maintenance
> home:taxes:irrigation_district
> home:taxes:realestate
>
> and so on.
>
> One of the reports that I'd like to see would group together all of the
> related stuff across the vehicles (and ignore anything related to home),
> while another report would say, in essence, here's what I've spent on
> insurance this year, and here's what I've spent on taxes, and so on.
>
> Anyway, as for the [ab]user interface, I've seen several instances around
> of two windows where "here's what's currently selected for inclusion" and
> "these items are not currently included" -- you click on one to highlight
> it, and then click on the arrow that's between the two columns to move it.
>
A two-column type setup is the sort of thing I had in mind. However,
what you need to be able to do is build a *tree* for a report to
summarise things into.
> What I would envision is that when you're setting up/modifying a report,
> you would create new "catagory" (or some appropriate word) (or possibly
> select an existing one if modifying an existing report) and then you
> would get the "two column" included/not included display described in the
> previous paragraph. (We might want to include a "check box" that the user
> could check to only allow a given account to only appear on one catagory,
> and possibly also a choice between "ignore unselected accounts"/"report
> unselected accounts as an error"/"put unselected accounts into a default
> 'misc.' catagory".)
>
> I think that such a user interface could be made both sufficiently general
> as to satisfy the vast majority of people's needs, and is also relatively
> intuitive if the GUI is set up correctly.
>
> There are, of course, many "implementation details", such as the need to
> allow the user to have multiple reports set up, an easy/intuitive way of
> selecting things like "date ranges" (including an "all before"!), what to
> do about new accounts that have been created since the last time the report
> was run, just how we represent the report on disk, and so on. Also, when
> selecting accounts, we'd want to (eventually) be able to select multiple
> accounts (with shift lmb and control lmb), and maybe even a way to "select
> accounts based on a regular expression" (after all, this _IS_ a "Unix-like"
> OS :-).
>
> Remember, a conclusion is where you got tired of thinking -- this is my
> conclusion. :-)
Yep. My thoughts are along similar lines. This should probably be
firmed up into a proposal, somwhere in the not too distant future.
ATM I'm trying to make guppi graphs display from GnuCash.
I should have a simple demo ready soon :)
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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