[SL] gnc20.perl Recipe

[<rlo...@fo...>]

All,

I kept at it and finally got some of what I wanted from gnc20.perl. I've 
pasted below a recipe for what I did; perhaps it can save some time and 
frustration for others.

In gnucash select File, then Export, then Export Accounts.Name the file
gnucash.xml and select a folder to save it in. I saved it in /tmp, where I
had already placed gnc20.perl. This will simplify things. Click on the 
Export button.

Go to where you've saved the export and gnc20.perl. I made gnc20.perl 
executable (chmod 755...) but perl is an interpreted language so I don't think
this is necessary. Then do:

perl ./gnc20.perl

and the output should stream by on the screen. Next, repeat the command but
redirect that output to a new COA:

perl ./gnc20.perl > foobar-chart.sql

This should work fine. If it doesn't check permissions and ownerships; but 
if you're using a UNIX or variant you should already know all about that 
stuff, it's usually the first thing to bite a newbie user. Move 
foobar-chart.sql to your sql-ledger directory and place it in the sql
directory. Adjust the permissions and ownership to match the other 
*-chart.sql files in there.

Log in to sql-ledger as admin and create a new dataset using 
foobar-chart.sql (it should appear in the list) and edit your usual user 
to use that dataset. foobar-chart.sql is just a list of sql insert 
statements that will be used by the database to create the various tables 
in the new dataset. That's it, alas. I was hoping it would magically 
import the actual data as well but it doesn't look like that is the case. 
You'll likely have lots of account re-numbering to do too if you didn't 
give your gnucash accounts numbers; like I didn't. The script looks for 
gnucash.xml for its input file but you can edit that easily to look for 
any file, it's right up by the top of gnc20.perl. Look for "gnucash.xml". 
I'm not going to clean up my COA until I can import all my data. That way 
everything will be the same numbering scheme (if gnc20.perl and any future 
data import script think alike.) Until then I'll stick with gnucash and 
see what happens. In the meantime, sql-ledger looks pretty nice and I can 
always psql right into the tables themselves, something I understand much 
better than XML, or perl.

HTH somebody.

r