On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Derek Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > Quoting Eric Anopolsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >> I'm not familiar with gnucash's data structures so I'm not 100% sure >> what a "code" is, but would it be possible to identify each account by >> an int or a bigint instead of a code? Then this secondary table could >> have the "account int" as its foreign primary key, and you could have >> another table that maps "account int" to "code" with the code as a >> varchar(2048) as desired. >> >> Or put the "account int" and the "code" in the same table and make the >> int the primary key instead. >> >> Totally unreasonable? > > Uhh, yeah. Sorry. Totally unreasonable. > > The "code" in question is a user-input field. Historically accountants > used codes instead of names to keep track of accounts. So GnuCash provides > a place for you to enter in an Account Code. But it's a string, not a number. > Granted, most users probably do only use numbers, but there is no > requirement that it be a number. > >> Cheers, >> Eric > > -derek >
As a GnuCash-naive, but MySQL-adept user, I would have recommended the same thing as Eric. The point being: never use user-input fields for keys. Sure, code needs to be a string because users want to be able to enter anything into it. So don't use it as a key. I doubt that's *totally* unreasonable, though I suspect it's practically unreasonable if you're already using code (and similar fields) as a key all over the place. Moreover, I, for one, see no reason code could not be truncated to 32 characters, except that it might point to a problematic usage of fields for both user input and application logic. But, hey, I'm not even sure how I would fill out the code field, so don't listen to me ;) Is there a functional reason for fields to be used for both user input and keying? Should a user be able to create two accounts, enter code on both, and have them magically relate? I haven't seen any functionality like this in my GnuCash journeys, so I doubt it, but it's the only reason I can fathom to use code both as user input and as a key. -ISH _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
