Re: [Gnumed-devel] Re: Billing / Invoicing applications for GNUmed

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Am Freitag 07 Mai 2010 15:21:33 schrieb Gour:
> On Fri, 7 May 2010 09:46:32 +0200
> 
> >>>>>> "Sebastian" == Sebastian Hilbert wrote:
> Sebastian> Summary:
> Sebastian> Amberdms seems to fit the bill for now. GNUcash is a corner
> Sebastian> case but seems to lack an API
> 
> The main GNUCash dev commented the following:
> 
> "And there IS an API (but it's in C), .. And Scheme, .. And now
> python"

I found those bindings as well. Did not know about the C-API nor the scheme 
stuff. Might be worth a look.

Conflicting answers are given at the mailing lists.

Bottom line seems to be that GNUcash is not multiuser capable. So one needs to 
go the extra mile to lock the GNUcash database. They do not recommend that at 
all for the PostgreSQL data storage.

However for our use case it might work as we can try to enforce that. Problem 
can occur when GNUmed and GNUcash try to write to the GNUcash data storage at 
the same time.

One could however reduce that problem by producing a new database for each 
invoice, produce the pdf, hand it to GNUmed and throw away the database.

This would break features like account balance but hey at least it should 
work.

One of the devs said there is no such things as a gnucash-server so locking is 
up to the app. Furthermore GNUcash (at least past revisions) is/was dependent 
on a GUI process so they need to refactor had (or have alredy). 

They seems to have introduced a XML-backend which is supposedly easy to 
understand and change. This could be some sort of short term solution.

Whoever implements it gets to decide :-)

> 
> As far as python-gnucash bindings
> (http://www.parit.ca/projects/pythongnucash/) he told me that they
> "have been partially integrated into the mainline sources."
> 
I have seen that. They state that it is largely undocumentented. I wonder it 
it is complete enough. Surely worth checking out.

> For API docs, see http://code.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/
> 
Here is the deal. First one to send me some working code that (somehow) 
produces an invoice (pdf or odt) from GNUmed through GNUcash or amberdms (or 
whatever) will receive a free GNUmed USB drive containing GNUmed to go (TM)

I guess if you are really eager one could hack up OpenOffice to do the invoice 
part. We would still be missing features like invoice tracking (due, paid, 
whatever) and all those nifty pie charts :-)

Sebastian