GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 334939
Account Report and Account Transaction Report are apparently the same, but different
Last modified: 2018-06-29 21:00:03 UTC
When an account register page is active, the Reports->Account Report and Reports->Account Transaction Report each open a new report. A) the tooltip texts for these two menuitems are identical B) the report titles of the two opened reports are identical C) the available options for the two reports are identical But the reports are clearly different. I guess A) and B) are bugs.
Absolutely. Do you have any idea what a better report title and/or tooltip text would be?
r16047 gets (A). (B) is, of course, hard to figure out how to resolve. I see the report name field being defined as Register, but there is the seperate report title being passed down in. But the title ("${fully-qualified-account-name} - Account Report" or something) is just too long to use as the report/tab name, even if it was clear where to add it in.
I would like to propose to combine these two reports into one. The reports have the same purpose: Report the transaction of the open account register. Difference: "Account Report" reports all transaction, "Account Transaction Report" reports only the selected transaction. It should be sufficient to have only one report that reports all transactions if no specific transaction is selected, or the selected transaction. This can be achieved by a very small change in the function gnc_plugin_page_register_cmd_transaction_report () in src/gnome/gnc-plugin-page-register.c The trick is, if there is no transaction selected, it means that the last - obviously emtpy - transaction is selected. This "empty" transaction is the only transaction that has no account assigned to it. Even if you change the date of this transaction and press enter, it looks like an empty transaction is added to the account, but in fact the assigned account data is not NULL anymore. (I tested this.) I also propose to rename the report tab to "Acc Trx Report". The proposed changes are attached as patches after this comment. For change tracability I spread the change about several patches: part1 - do the change to the gnc_plugin_page_register_cmd_transaction_report() function in gnc-plugin-page-register.c. Now it is possible to call the "Account Transaction Report" with the new functionality. Depending on the selection, you will get the full list or the selected transaction. part2 - do the report title change in src/report/standard-reports/register.scm to introduce the new tab title part3 - comment out everything that belongs to the old "Account Report" and which is not needed anymore. Now "Account Report" does not show up anymore in the Report menue. part4 - delete those lines that have been commented out in part 3. (meaning: clean up)
Created attachment 246670 [details] [review] functional change of Account Transaction Report
Created attachment 246671 [details] [review] change of report tab title part II
Created attachment 246672 [details] [review] comment out everything connected to "Account Report" part III
Created attachment 246673 [details] [review] clean up part IV
ah, sorry forgot to mention: the patches above have been developed on top of GnuCash 2.5.0
Comment on attachment 246671 [details] [review] change of report tab title Thanks for working on this issue. However, please do not introduce weird abbreviations as report name. The program should avoid abbreviations as much as possible (not the least because of i18n reasons).
Although the idea to collapse this into one single report depending on some useful user choice is very useful, I still have doubts whether your chosen criterion is really understandable enough for a user. In effect, I think you are removing the "report with all txns", because IMHO the user sees no relation between moving the cursor to the blank line and then getting a report with many txns instead of one single txn, which is the report's behaviour in all other cursor positions. On the other hand, it is a valid question to ask whether the "report with all txn" is really needed. Apparently this feature is still being asked for (I don't use it, though). But if it's being asked for, the user must be able to select such a report pretty much regardless of where the cursor is positioned. Hence, I think two different menu entries are indeed the appropriate thing to do here.
Created attachment 246881 [details] [review] change of report tab title Regarding the abbreviations in the tab title: Good point, thanks for hint. I changed this now to "Account Transaction Report". Setting it to "Transaction Report" might not be a good idea as it collides with the "real" Transaction Report which works a bit different.
Regarding the proposal to collapse the account reports into one: You point out the possibility that the proposed solution might in effect remove the "all txns" part, because the user might not find it anymore (hope that is a correct summary of your thought above). Interesting: Looking from that perspective, the "single trx" part was not existing for me for a very long time because I simply did not understand that I had to select a transaction before calling this report. For me it was a not working artifact that produced an empty page - until I read a hint in the gnucash-user mailing list, when some other users were discussing about this report. And by the fact that others users discussed it, I believe that I was not the only one who missed the idea of the "single trx" report. Anyway, I do get you point that the two different functionalities are not obvious if collapsed into one report. But instead of solving this by two different menu entries, I suggest to fix this in documentation. Meaning: a 5th patch is needed to complete the proposed solution which is adding information about motivation and functionality of the account transaction report to the available user documentation. In fact, I was looking into this, but I am reluctant to start working with SVN while the documentation is on the way into git, isn't it?
Created attachment 246962 [details] [review] documentation patch on Help_ch_Reports.xml Those who can read eventually will find the git repository for documentation :-) Here is a patch to add the behaviour of the combined solution into documentation. Part V
While I appreciate your counter argument that for you the Account Transaction Report always has been a mystery, I share Christian's concern about the userfriendliness of the chosen criterion for one single report. With your proposed solution there is no visual clue that the report will behave differently depending on the selection in the register. That leads to confusion. Adding documentation may help, but isn't that also true for the original situation ? If the Account Transaction Report was not clear to you, was that because it wasn't documented properly ? There are a couple of ways to go from here IMO: 1. We revert back to two separate menu items. In that case the documentation should be improved for the Account Transaction Report (if that is the actual cause of confusion). To improve the user experience the Account Transaction Report could be disabled if no transaction is selected in the open register. 2. If you insist on making it into one menu entry, I would propose adding a new option to the report that switches between report one transaction and all transactions in the register. That would allow the user to correct the report if he didn't get what he intended. A user will expect an option rather than selecting a transaction in a register to switch between report selections. Whether or not a transaction was selected can at best cause the report to use a different default for that option. I'm not sure if the second choice will be easy to implement though. I haven't looked at this specific report and I don't know if there is a link back from the report to the register to retrieve the choice of transactions if the option is switched.
Just to clarify: the above proposed ways forward are the two I see. I'm open for even better solutions :)
Well, in fact, I do not really have a too strong opinion here, so please read this comment as pure reply, not as "insisting" on my point of view. What I see is: - this issue was opened 7 years ago - no solution implemented up to now, no complaints for example on the user mailing list, nor any further comments in this bug since 6 years - regarding user friendliness my proposal does not really improve the user experience (although it is not worsening it neither) What I do not see: - What is the motivation for these reports (I do not use it myself up to now) - How big is the target group that would benefit from a "decent" solution, or suffer from a "simplified" solution, as my current guess is that only a few people might really use it Could it be that the current user group that is utilizing these reports is small enough and used to the current implementation that we can close this bug with a "NOFIX"? In short: The benefit of any solution to this bug appears low to me (as already said, I am aware that this is a very subjective perception due to missing insights) and therefore I would propose to keep the effort as low as possible and coding impact as low as possible. (Actually, even the time spent on discussing this bug should stay in reasonable limits.) Consequently, even changing the report tab title only by applying patch part II above is sufficient for me to close this bug - maybe, adding some words to the documentation about the background of the two existing reports would still be nice ;-)
A somewhat late reply due to holidays... The report options existed already from before I started using GnuCash, so I don't know for sure why they were created. But my educated guess is that they were added as a way to easily print a register or single transaction. The GnuCash documentation has very little information on the two reports. Improving this would be a good first thing. The Account Report is referenced in the "Printing or Exporting Reports and Graphs" section (source: gnucash-docs/help/C/Help_ch_Reports.xml), but there's no mention in that section on the Account Transaction Report. Both reports are briefly mentioned again in "GnuCash Window & Menu Options Overview" -> "Account Register/General Ledger" (source: gnucash-docs/help/C/Help_ch_GUIMenus.xml). Again there's very little additional info on these reports. At least the two sections also point in the direction that the primary purpose of the two reports is to easily print a register or single transaction. And that brings us to another slightly convoluted workflow in GnuCash: it only supports printing of reports (and cheques but that's not relevant here). So if you want a printout of a register, you first need to convert it into a report and then you can print that report. I was tempted to propose "Print Register" and "Print Transaction" as new names, but I'm not sure that is any better. Using either menu item doesn't print yet, it only generates a report you can then print. Improving this situation is clearly outside the scope of this bug. Instead I agree that this bug report only points out a minor issue, which ideally should only take minor effort to improve. A a bug in the "Every detail matters" or "Papercuts" category. The small things that polish the full experience. The core issue here seems to be the confusion caused by the report names, equal tool tips and tab titles. Improving those would mostly solve this issue. I would propose a more explicit report name for the single transaction variant, so we would get - Account Report (for the complete register) - Account Report - Single Transaction (obviously for one transaction only) I didn't find a "tooltip" for the reports as the original poster mentioned. There is a status bar message when hovering the report items though. This is already different for the two reports so nothing needs to be done there. Optionally the tab titles (ie the default report names) could better reflect which type of report was opened. What do you think ?
> - Account Report (for the complete register) > - Account Report - Single Transaction (obviously for one transaction only) Sounds good to me and indeed an improvement over the current situation.
Created attachment 252094 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on gnc-plugin-page-register.c in GnuCash 2.5.3 yep, looks like we found a compromise ;-)
Created attachment 252095 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on gnc-plugin-page-register2.c in GnuCash 2.5.3 same patch for register2
Created attachment 252097 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on register.scm in GnuCash 2.5.3 one more for the report scm-file. Change the tab title from "Register" to "Transaction Report" and set the default report title from "Register Report" to "Transaction Report". The documentation is already added to http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Account_Report and is waiting for being picked up by Bug 633590 - Document the GnuCash reports
Comment on attachment 252094 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on gnc-plugin-page-register.c in GnuCash 2.5.3 Committed as r23147 (together with the patch for register2). Thank you very much
Comment on attachment 246672 [details] [review] comment out everything connected to "Account Report" Superseded.
Comment on attachment 246673 [details] [review] clean up Superseded
Comment on attachment 246881 [details] [review] change of report tab title Superseded
Comment on attachment 246670 [details] [review] functional change of Account Transaction Report Superseded
Comment on attachment 246962 [details] [review] documentation patch on Help_ch_Reports.xml Documentation proposal is in the wiki.
Comment on attachment 252095 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on gnc-plugin-page-register2.c in GnuCash 2.5.3 Together with the patch for the old register. Thank you very much!
Comment on attachment 252097 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on register.scm in GnuCash 2.5.3 I was about to commit this patch as well, but while testing it struck me that the title "Transaction Report" may be quite confusing. We have another report named "Transaction Report" in the menu list, but this one has a different set of configuration options. Users may get confused when they remember they once had a "Transaction Report" open (based on the report name) and then try to recreate it using the menu item "Transaction Report". Would "Account Report" be a better name for this specific report ? I am aware Christian committed another patch recently to change the report name for the report opened from a General Ledger. I have the same reservation there. I'm interested in your opinions.
I double-checked: The General Journal report uses the same tab and report title. If register.scm is changed to "Account Report" in you will see this in the tab also for the General Journal. By applying the patch as is the reports - General Journal - General Ledger - Account Report - Account Report - Single Transaction will have the same tab title and report title "Transaction Report". For me that is fine, because they all are of the same nature "transaction report" (meaning: it is an improvement compared to today's situation). Of course, if you open them all next to each other you will not be able to distinguish between them by just looking at the tab titles. But to improve on this I suggest to open a new enhancement request that shall find a solution on top of the patches for this bug and Bug 696492 (I guess that is the one that you are referring to above).
I was indeed referring to bug 696492. I had seen the commit but didn't have time then to look at it more closely. If I did, I probably would not have accepted the patch as is and started this discussion then already. IMO the patch for that bug has the same problem I'm trying to convey here. We have 5 different menu items - General Journal - General Ledger - Account Report - Account Report - Single Transaction - Transaction Report After your patch, all 5 would generate a report titled "Transaction Report". That makes it very difficult to remember afterwards which menu item was actually used to open the report in the first place. In that context I won't apply the remaining patch, because it's not an improvement in my opinion. While "Register Report" is not accurate either it's closer and more useful than the more generic "Transaction Report" I have followed your suggestion and created a new enhancement request for more accurate report titles: bug 709251.
BTW as a closing remark from my side: I'm well aware my opinion is close to nitpicking. However, as I briefly mentioned before I consider this bug in the "papercuts" category, the minor anoyances that have big impact on user experience. For this kind of bugs, I prefer to think it through thoroughly while we are looking at it and go for the best possible improvement. Otherwise the minor annoyance is only partly fixed (or in the wrong way creating new annoyances), and will linger for a long time again, exactly because it's just a minor annoyance. Experienced users get used to these small annoyances and don't see them anymore after some time. But new users are tripped up by them time after time again. That's why it's important the small annoyances get sufficient attention as well.
Comment on attachment 252097 [details] [review] patch file to be applied on register.scm in GnuCash 2.5.3 See comment 31 for a motivation.
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