API: Business

Business Objects

The GnuCash Business objects, in src/business/business-core, implement certain basic small-business accounting functions. Below follows a summary overview of the objects and the data that they store. These are listed in order of complexity; with the basic building blocks first, and the more complex structures last.

Address:

A very simple object, stores strings for name/street-address/phone/fax/email The address is not a separate entity, but is meant to be embedded in other objects (that is, there is no addressbook; there is no address database that is separate from the objects that use addresses; there is no 'foreach' that can be used to iterate over all addresses.)

API: Address

BillTerm:

Describes billing terms, that is when a bill is due, and what sort of a discount is applied (if any). The BillTerm object currently supports: – the discount applied to a bill (absolute numeric value), – the number of days until payment is due, – the number of days until a discount expires. – cutoff ?? The proximo type does what ???

API: BillTerm

Entry:

Invoice:

Pulls together info needed to generate an invoice, including addresses, job, the dates, the billing terms, the amounts, and the accounts to be credited.

API: Entry

Business Design & Implementation Notes

Derek Atkins warlo.nosp@m.rd@m.nosp@m.it.ed.nosp@m.u Version of October 2003

The gncTaxTable and gncBillTerm business objects have parent, child, refcount, invisible field in their structures that deserve some explanation:

a child is a 'frozen' instance of a parent. For example, the tax percentage in a particular tax table may change over time, but you dont want that change to affect already-posted invoices... So you make sure there is an immutable 'copy' (read: child) of the tax table when you post the invoice and repoint at the child.
a parent can have many children, but it will only have a 'child' pointer if the parent has not been modified. Think of this as a copy-on-write mechanism. posted invoices will continue to use the same child until the parent is modified, at which point a new child will be created.
invisible means "dont show this in the list". It's so you dont get all the children in the tax table list – you only see parents. I suppose this flag could also be called "is-child" as I believe that only children can be invisible, and ALL children are invisible.
refcount is a listing of how many objects are referencing it. Basically, it's letting you know how many customer, vendor, entries, etc are referencing e.g. a particular tax table object. mostly this was done to make sure you cannot delete an in-use taxtable.
children don't use refcounts, only parents do.
A child always points to its parent (it can have only 1).
A parent has a list of all children.
A parent has a pointer to the current 'replica child', if one exists.