GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 733107
Cannot search for Reconcile status in Linux
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:31:49 UTC
When using release 2.6.3 (rev 4e4a032+ on 2014-04-08) in Ubuntu Linux 12.04: Start in an account register such as a credit card register. Use ctrl-f to bring up the search dialog. In the search criteria area use the down arrow in the left hand box below the "Add" button then select "Reconcile". Boxes for "Is/Is Not" and the statuses Not Cleared, Cleared, Reconciled, Frozen and Voided appear. Unlike the behavior in release 2.4.13 windows version, it is not possible to click on those various status buttons and see them get highlighted or not. Also, the Find button in the lower right does not get highlighted. If I click on Find anyway, I think it finds everything regardless of whether "All" or "Any" is selected with only one criterion configured. I believe the behavior is the same when starting from the "Accounts" window or the "General Ledger" window. I also believe that at least most of the other search features do work correctly.
I forgot to mention that the similar function under the View > Filter by... > Status seems to work correctly in both versions.
It also seems odd that this whole search dialog uses an entirely different graphic design than the rest of GnuCash. This is just a comment, as it should be in a separate bug report if someone thinks it really needs to be changed to match the rest of the program.
I think I found the problem, or at least the part of it that I can reproduce. The search for reconcile status is essentially ignoring Is/Is Not menu and always assuming "Is Not" is selected. This is a problem introduced in 54cd656 which was part of 2.6.3. I can't see the other problems you mention. The buttons work fine for me and the dialog looks much the same as other GnuCash windows. I use the X-Window version in MacOSX so it's not surprising that the appearance is different than what you see, but I don't see why the buttons don't work for you. I have a change that seems to fix the problem ready to push. I need to test it a bit more but I'll try to push it tomorrow or the next day.
In (Windows) release 2.4.13 the various buttons representing status appear to change after a lag of a second or two. That might be a graphic issue, as they seem to go through a fade cycle. I have not investigated using graphic themes in Linux, so I cannot test to see if a different graphic theme works differently. In this Linux version 2.6.3 there is a double line border around the status value buttons with a very tiny space between the lines which will assume the highlight color (kind of red) when the curser hovers over the button, but that is all I can see on a rather low quality laptop screen. Those buttons do not change color when clicked. As I mentioned earlier, in this particular Linux instance, the lower right "Find" button never changes color when messing around with the buttons associated with this criterion as it does with other criteria when a valid search is selected. Elsewhere in GnuCash when the user is expected to select only one choice of several, a simple drop-down or pop-up list is used as when choosing an action on a menu with sub-menus or choosing an account when editing a transaction. Here there are those fuzzy buttons. Also, when multiple yes/no choices are available, GnuCash normally uses check boxes as in the Preferences screens or some of of the report configuration screens instead of buttons that fade into a different color which might look the same in some graphic themes. Now that I think about it, it is also not clear to me what the "is/is not" choice means here. This search criterion appears to be designed to select transactions containing split lines that have a status matching any of the highlighted buttons but not matching un-highlighted buttons(???). A given split line can only have a single status but the search is for many. Perhaps only one status should be allowed to be selected, and if the user wants to find two statuses he should add another criterion to choose the second status. Then there should only be one button or box with a drop-down list. Alternatively, if the graphic is supposed to mimic the old car radios where pushing one button cancels the previous selection, then two choices should not be allowed. In release 2.4.13 more than one button can be highlighted simultaneously. There is also no prompt telling the user that he needs to click the button and watch for a color change as opposed to seeing a check in a box or even a dot in a radio button. I suppose graphics might also vary in different Linux desktops. I also find the overall method used to select combinations of multiple criteria confusing, as it looks the same as when only one criterion is used. After all of that, please consider this to only request that the status criterion be fixed in a way that is unambiguous and functional. Other issues should get their own bug reports.
I just pushed a fix for the main problem. With this change searching for reconciled status should work again. I'll leave the GUI issues to someone else. Many of them I don't see: the buttons change appearance when selected and the find button is active. I can see that the dialog could be improved, but I'm not the right person to do that. I generally do plumbing, not GUI. The current dialog works like this: each of the buttons corresponds to one of the values that can appear in the "reconciled" column of a split. If the "is" option is selected it will find any split whose status correspond to a selected button. If "is not" is selected it will find any split whose status does not match a selected button. Perhaps the buttons should be checkboxes, but otherwise it doesn't seem all that bad. However, I'm not the right person to be designing GUIs. I'm marking this fixed. If you want to pursue the GUI changes perhaps a new bug report would be appropriate, or reopen this one if you think that is better.
so is it now possible to see the selected/not selected status of a button on this screeen in the Linux version release 2.6.3? Or should I create a new bug report for that?
I don't know if the buttons changed on Linux since I don't use it, but I didn't change anything that is obviously related to that.
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