[Kmymoney-devel] Custom reports

[Alvaro Soliverez]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Alexey Goncharov
<a.k.goncharov at ctrl-v.biz> wrote:
>> At first, it won't have an impact on users, but the goal is to make it more
>> flexible for future.
>
> Do you plan to use any script language for report generation or how
> flexibility can be achieved?
>

At the moment, I hadn't planned adding a script interface, but we
might in the future. There's some internal data restructuring that
needs to be done first. I'll comment more on that below.

>> Now, if you tell me about the use case you are foreseeing, I might
>> give you more help on it.
>
> Right now the most interesting and actual report for is "Income and Expenses
> this month". As I mentioned before in the IRC-channel I can't adjust the depth
> of category tree to be displayed: there only two ways: "top-level" and
> "everything".  "Top-level" is really silent and doesn't provide me with the
> full information. As long as my category tree is huge and rich, a report with
> every category displayed looks ugly and non-informative too. Here is the first
> and well-known case.

The issue at stake here is that reports use a data structure that only
has those levels. So, the first step is to restructure the data to
better mimic the category hierarchies. Also, today the reports are
displayed as html, and the code for html generation and data
calculation is mixed together in a big pile of messy code. That has to
be fixed, with data calculation on one side, and report rendering on
the other. With that, we can think of adding a more dynamic mode for
reports, using UI widgets (QTable or similar) instead of static html.
This way, we could have changes to the report on the fly,
collapsing/expanding columns/rows as needed.

>
> The second case... I'd like to use the data from previous months to compare it
> with this month - to see trends. All the data in my dreams should be displayed
> on one report (charts, diagramms, etc are really appreciated too).
> Unfortunately I have no ideas how does the end-user can select and adjust his
> own custom report-view in other ways than script language.
>

This, I don't quite understand. You can have this now. Customize an
income and expense report to show the data monthly, for the dates you
want. The chart detail can be modified independently of the report
(with the above mentioned constraints).

We offer a default array of reports (which we are already being told
as too many :) ), but each report can be further customized in a lot
of ways.

What are you missing?

What I'd like to have is the ability to drill-down with a click.
That's a mid-term goal. Again, I don't think scripting is the right
way to go, but a good combination of sensible data models and UI
widgets.


>> Of course, an extra hand is always welcome.
>
> I really want to be useful but don't know where to go :-)
>

A sample of the customizations would be great. Knowing the gap between
what we have today and what is desired is a very good step. My own
imagination only goes so far.

Feel free to ask any doubts or issues you find.

Regards,
Alvaro