BANAL version 0.10

Chapter 4: Advanced Topics

This chapter deals with fairly advanced topics including how the database (tables) files are setup and why certain design decisions were made.

4.1: How the Tax field behaves

The Tax field in the Charge table is no longer a special category. Properties of the various taxes are now properly configurable in the setting table. See the settings section (2.3.2) for more details.

4.2: Why Date fields are formatted as YYYY.MMDD

Dates are a pain. The reason we chose the YYYY.MMDD format for dates is simple. We wanted to be able to do numeric-style comparisons. With the date format as it is we are able to do searches on dates such as:

Date ge 1997 and Paid lt 1997.0401

This search (when used with the bk invoices command) will return a list of all invoices that were generated in 1997 or later and were paid before April 1st. If you can show us a date format that is able to do the same without lots of fussing and is also not error prone, please let me know.

NOTE: I guess YYYY/MM/DD would have have worked too. Using a string comparison, though.

4.3: BANAL Tables

The templates for the tables are in the templates directory and there is a script in bin called tablegen which will generate a working set of books from the templates and corresponding data. There are also some sample books in the sample directory including an empty set if you do not wish to generate your starting books.

Here are a couple of noteworthy pieces of information for people making or interested in BANAL tables:

  1. The first field in each file is a unique ID field. The field name is the same as the table's. The first character is uppercase and all other characters are lowercase.

  2. Any values with tabspaces (\t) or newlines (\n) will have them changed to the two character strings, '\T' and '\N', respectively. These strings will be changed back as needed (editting, running a transaction) but not when being listed.

  3. KEYWORDS are placed in the Field Description. These keywords are seperate from the rest of the description by the string '@@'. The current keywords are:

    /^[A-Z][a-z]* ID/
    means that this references an ID from another table. (NOTE: This is a regular expression)

    CATEGORIZED
    means that valid values come from the Category table.

    MULTILINE
    means that you may enter a value that spans multiple lines.

    REQUIRED
    means that the field must be set when adding/editting.

    YYYY.MMDD
    in the description means it is a date field.

    NEG_OK
    indicates that this field may have a negative value.

The tables that are distributed with this version include:

Category
The category table is quite special. Any other table that wants to define a field that can only contain specific values places these values in this table.

Charge
A charge is a billable item. It may be a good or a service and may be registered against a project.

Client
A client is a person that you are able to register invoices, projects and other items against. There are also optional fields to specify where to send the billings.

Employee
Employee entries are used for tracking timesheets, expenses, leads for clients and projects.

Expense
The expense table is used for tracking your expenditures.

Invoice
An invoice hold the main information pertaining to each invoice. It will reference zero or more 'Charge' entries which contain itemized details of the invoice.

Procedure
A table for tracking information on have things are done in your workplace.

Project
A project may be used to track income and expenses for a particular job that may span more than one invoice (or no invoices for an internal project).

Recurrence
Use this table for registering recurring (and memorized) transactions.

Setting
This table stores all of the configurable information for BANAL.

Supplier
Use this table to track suppliers and assign expenses to them.

Timesheet
Use the timesheet entry for tracking time spent on various projects.

4.3.1: Adding your own tables

You can easily add your own table by creating a RDB file in your books directory. The RDB file must start with a capital letter and be followed by lowercase letters (eg. Todo.rdb). The only mandatory field is the first one in a record. It must be the same name as the RDB file (without the .rdb extension - eg. Todo).

The next time you start the bkd server it will notice the new file and generate a modify and list command for it.

You can either copy an existing database and modify it as desired or you may copy a .tpl file in the templates directory and have tablegen generate your books (remember, you can include initial data in a .dat file).

Details on RDB template files and the RDB header can be obtained from the full RDB documentation.

4.4: Foreign Currencies

The support for foreign currencies is very simple. There are two new fields in the Invoice table, Currency and Exchange. If you wish to create an invoice in a non-local currency then just assign these fields.

Generation of invoices and financial statements will handle the different currencies appropriately. You can specify an estimated exchange rate at the time that you create the invoice and, later, update it to the true exchange rate when you receive payment.

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