GNUe Traffic #64 For 18�Jan�2003

Editor: Peter Sullivan

By Arturas Kriukovas �and� Peter Sullivan

"if "shower == a place to go during long data uploads" isn't in the hackers' dictionary, it should be ;-)"

Table Of Contents

• Standard Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	9�Jan�2003		Foreign currency conversion
  2.	9�Jan�2003		Triggers and foreign keys in GNUe Forms
  3.	9�Jan�2003		GNUe Financials in Europe
  4.	9�Jan�2003		Different Forms Clients
  5.	13�Jan�2003		Case-Insensitive LIKE in GNUe
  6.	14�Jan�2003		Problems opening forms in Designer
  7.	15�Jan�2003	(1 post)	Using PostgreSQL with GNUe with a sockets file
  8.	15�Jan�2003		Using Bayonne and GNUe together

Introduction

This Cousin covers the three main mailing lists for the GNU Enterprise (http://www.gnuenterprise.org) project, plus the #gnuenterprise IRC channel. Kernel Cousins GNUe is now group-authored: if you'd like to join the team, let us know (mailto:psu@burdonvale.co.uk) .

1. Foreign currency conversion

9�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 09 Jan 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

People: Nicholas Lee,�Peter Sullivan

Further to Issue�#54, Section�#11� (31�Oct�2002:�Multi-currency in General Ledger) , Nicholas Lee (esands) said he had "almost given up on trying to hack better currency handling into sql-ledger. SL's code is not as bad as nola though. I thought I had a simple method..." Peter Sullivan (psu) confessed that "I still haven;t really looked at your e-mail" on this. Nicholas said he thought he had "a solution to that problem. Soln based on implicit information contained within the source currency GL account. This gives you at least a 2nd ratio for the currency exchange rates to set up the two tuples to the base currency to represent the transaction. The only corner case, being if their are no source currency transactions. Or no destn currency transaction. Then user interaction would be required, and probably expected to get a correct answer." Peter thought that this "sounds like Euro-style triangulation (well, sorta)" .

2. Triggers and foreign keys in GNUe Forms

9�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 10 Jan 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Forms

People: Anthony Lenton,�Jason Cater

Anthony Lenton (aa_) was "trying to pass papo's forms from (something close to, and very much touched up) 0.4 to a (cvs version close to) 0.5; buttons don't parse, exiting with a" 'I do not recognize the "trigger" attribute' error. He couldn't find anything resembling triggers in GFParser.py and asked on irc. Jason Cater (jcater) explained that "Buttons now have an "On-Action" trigger" , that was described in http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/gnue/2002-11/msg00047.html (http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/gnue/2002-11/msg00047.html) . On the whole, "trigger syntax has not changed, the only difference is that buttons now have proper triggers, instead of a trigger="<named trigger>" attribute, but an actual <trigger> hasn't changed" .

Anthony said that the mail did not say anything about foreign_key_* attributes. Jason said that these had been changed to fk_source, fk_key and fk_description - "fk_source is the datasource to use, fk_key is the "key" field in the source table (i.e., the field that will be copied over when the user selects something), fk_description is the field that will be displayed for the user. All the fk_* refer to a separate datasource/table, than the one containing <field> tag, i.e., if I have a lookup table:

-	colors
1	red
2	blue
3	green

then I could create a <datasource table="colors" name = "dtsColors" .../>, the field that wants to use that reference table would look like: <field name="..." field="..." fk_source="dtsColors" fk_key="id" fk_description="color"/>, well, assuming the 1,2,3 in the colors table are the "id" field and red, blue, green are the "color" field" .

3. GNUe Financials in Europe

9�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 10 Jan 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Financials (Accounting)

People: Dmitry Sorokin,�Andr� Esteves,�Jason Cater,�ra3vat

Andr� Esteves (aife) asked whether the GNUe packages would be just American-orientated or would be localised for different countries. Dmitry Sorokin (ra3vat) said "we have developers from all around the world - but packages are not yet ready" . However, Andr� thought it was "excelent that you have planned gnue with "planet"-independence and vendor independence" . He explained "There are standar accounting practises that depend on the country you are on. How are you planning to adress that question? custom reports, custom ways of referencing accounts (of defining accounts)" . Dmitry said that Russian accounting practice was actually fairly similar to American. Andr� said that "in continental europe, the accounting system is defined by law (firstly by an european directive wich is tranlated to law in each eec country) - in anglosaxon countries i believe it is the accounting association that defines the standards" . He noted "in portugal for you to offer some kind of accounting program you have to certify it whith the government" .

He noted that other accounting packages provided "a logical framework for business anywhere in the world. then in each country they localise it, they prepare a special module that enables the software to report and show data as in acordance to local standards." Jason Cater (jcater) said "I would think that is our goal" , but this was dependant on "someone with intimate knowledge of that country" volunteering - "I honestly see that as a great role for consultants" , especially "individual consultants/developers" . But "until someone w/intimate knowledge of portugal (for example) joins the GNUe crusade, I doubt you would see the needed modules/support" - "of course they wouldn't be alone in their work - all of gnue would help them" .

4. Different Forms Clients

9�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 10 Jan 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Forms

People: Andr� Esteves,�Jason Cater,�Charles Rouzer,�James Thompson

Andr� Esteves (aife) asked if there were "any plans for a kde client?" Jason Cater (jcater) said "yes, we would like a native QT driver" as both he and James Thompson (jamest) "are KDE fans :)" Andr� asked if this would use pyQT. Jason said "PyQT provides everything we need - we've looked into it and it's on our todo list (0.7.x iirc) - but we've just had other pressing things - as it is usable under KDE. You just have to run it w/the GTK driver - not ideal, definitely - but not a showstopper either" - "a native curses client was more pressing for us" . aife asked about corba. Jason explained that Forms did not care "whether talking directly to a database, or using an XMLRPC or CORBA-based middleware - forms is independent from the app server - all of our tools work independently" . There were packages for GNUe in the Debian unstable distribution, but "I would just check out cvs - we have a script that installs it into your home directory that is easily removable. Just to see where we stand though - the 0.4.x branch (latest stable releases) " .

Andr� wondered why curses was a higher priority - "i know that it would be good to use all those old terminals lying around (i have reused old cp/m terminals thanks to terminfo) - but today everyone has a windowing environment" . Charles Rouzer (Mr_You) said "there are some terminals still used in some applications." Andr� suggested "An intersting app would a POS (Point of Sale) connected to Gnu-e (you could do it with forms? or a dedicated app would be more eficient?)" Jason said that he was looking at that for his bookstore, as previously discussed in Issue�#45, Section�#9� (30�Aug�2002:�Point of Sale (POS) systems for GNUe) .

5. Case-Insensitive LIKE in GNUe

13�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 13 Dec 2002"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Common

People: John Lenton,�Jason Cater

John Lenton (Chipaca) asked how it was possible to "override conditionElements in _dbsig with minimum effort?" Jason Cater (jcater) offered - "well the easiest way is don't do it" and asked what John was trying to do. Chipaca said he was trying to "get like to use ILIKE in postgres" because LIKE was case-sensitive and ILIKE was not case-sensitive (that's PostgreSQL specific, other databases, like mysql, had LIKE case-insensitive). Jason noted that "targetting one database kind of defeats the purpose of GNUe" so John answered that "users really really want searches to be case-insensible" . Finally John tried to do 'NOT ILIKE' and it worked.

6. Problems opening forms in Designer

14�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 14 Dec 2002"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Designer

People: Ariel Cal�,�Bajusz Tam�s,�Mike Vincent

Ariel Cal� (Ariel) said he was having problems - "i cannot load into" the CVS version of Designer "forms that have triggers. I get an error in refillTriggerCombo(). I cannot even run the interactive debugger because the error is before, in the init phase. The same forms run smootly in" the CVS version of Forms. He was using a recent CVS checkout and had deleted his previous install and re-installed. He had the same problem with intro.gfd - "runs well in forms, but i cannot load it in designer" . Bajusz Tam�s (btami) said "it works for me (intro.gfd in designer)" . Later, following version checks (gfdes: 0.4.99, python: 2.2., wxPython: 2.3.2.1), Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) thought the errors might be because of wxPython - "maybe you're onto something with the wxpython version, I had 2.3.x installed here too and it was getting used and causing me some problems (strange errors I dont recall exactly, something about missing c++ classes or something another)."

7. Using PostgreSQL with GNUe with a sockets file

15�Jan�2003 (1 post) Archive Link: "Connecting to PostgreSQL without TCP/IP"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Common

People: Jason Cater

Jason Cater(jcater) "recently ran across this tiny piece of trivia about PostgreSQL clients. If you specify the "host" parameter to be a directory, then the client looks for a sockets file in that directory" , rather than trying to connect using TCP/IP. He gave a sample entry for the connections.conf file, which depended on the GNU/Linux distribution (host = /tmp for most, host = /var/run/postgresql in Debian). He suggested "If you are running a single-machine setup (for example, a development machine), you are more than likely better off using this setup than TCP/IP as it is more secure (you can turn off TCP/IP listening so you aren't exposing your database to anything but a local client) and supposedly faster."

8. Using Bayonne and GNUe together

15�Jan�2003�Archive Link: "[IRC] 15 Dec 2002"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Bayonne, Application Server

People: David Sugar,�Jason Cater,�Derek Neighbors

David Sugar (dyfet) said he had an idea "of having the app server trigger to bayonne, because it would presumably sit on the same server with bayonne since we don't have xmlrpc yet" . Jason Cater (jcater) noticed that "the only advantage of having appserver do it is if the appserver and bayonne server are on same system, of course it will probably be much easier to get an xmlrpc setup for bayonne" . Jason offered for David "we need to get you guys hooked up with a python module, so we can access your stuff w/in python more easily" . David agreed with that. Derek Neighbors (derek) thought it is "not necessary to use appserver to talk to bayonne from my talking with rich, at least for most things. I think w/in 20 minutes you could have the dialout solution done." Jason asked David how was fifo set up. David explained - "it's in /var/run/bayonne/bayonne.ctrl, you just feed it statements, it is permission locked against group bayonne typically" . There was no documentation on what statements could be issued, but the source for that part was very small, written in C++. David said he "had looked at how we could embed python in bayonne..." as Jason saw modules/python.

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