Context-aware plugins

[Filippo Tampieri]

I need one of my plugins to know whether it is running from within bean-extract or otherwise.

Is there a clean way to achieve that?

Thank you,

fxt

[Martin Blais]

You could always look at the name of the top-level module (__main__.__file__) or sys.argv.

That's a bit of an odd need.

What's the use case?

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[Filippo Tampieri]

My use case is due to the interaction of the deposit_in_transit plugin and the transaction completer I use during import.

The transaction completer relies on the past entries to figure out which account to assign to the second posting of imported entries.

The deposit_in_transit plugin helps me deal with transactions such as credit card payments that appear in both the bank statement and the credit card statement.

For example, when I import my bank account statement, the transaction completer would complete an entry like this:

2016-03-23 * "Payment to AMEX"

  Assets:MyBankAccount                                    -1261.98 CAD

  Assets:DIT:Amex

When I import my credit card statement, the transaction completer would complete the corresponding entry like this:

2016-03-24 * "PAYMENT RECEIVED - THANK YOU"

  Liabilities:Amex                                  1261.98 CAD

  Assets:DIT:MyBankAccount

As you see, the first entry uses Assets:DIT:Amex to indicate that it is depositing funds in the Amex account rather than using the Assets:Amex account directly.

Similarly, the second entry receives the funds from Assets:DIT:MyBankAccount rather than directly from Assets:MyBankAccount.

This allows the importers to import all entries and I do not have to worry about detecting a transaction that is common to the two statements and commenting it out on one side and possibly dealing with the different dates of the two entries (which could cause a problem with balance assertions in certain cases).

Instead, I run the deposit_in_transit plugin that automatically creates a new entry that ties to first two:

2016-03-24 * "Payment to AMEX / PAYMENT RECEIVED - THANK YOU"

  Assets:DIT:MyBankAccount                               1261.98 CAD

  Assets:DIT:Amex

It also tags pending deposits and tags and links cleared transactions, but that is beyond the point of this discussion.

The problem I have is caused by an extension I made to the deposit_in_transit plugin. When the two entries happen on the same date, accountants will usually remove the transaction from the deposit-in-transit account (I use a pair of deposit-in-transit accounts, but just because I want those account names to give you info about the source and destination of the funds in the original entries) and use the original source and destination accounts directly. So, my plugin will do this as well and when faced with two entries such as:

2016-03-23 * "Payment to AMEX"

  Assets:MyBankAccount                                    -1261.98 CAD

  Assets:DIT:Amex

2016-03-23 * "PAYMENT RECEIVED - THANK YOU"

  Liabilities:Amex                                  1261.98 CAD

  Assets:DIT:MyBankAccount

(note that the only thing changed is that the two entries now share the same date), instead of adding a new entry to link them, it will replace them with a single entry:

2016-03-23 * "Payment to AMEX /  PAYMENT RECEIVED - THANK YOU"

  Assets:MyBankAccount                                    -1261.98 CAD

  Liabilities:Amex                                  1261.98 CAD

Nice and tidy.

But now, here is the problem with the import stage; when importing an entry such as:

2016-03-23 * "Payment to AMEX"

  Assets:MyBankAccount                                    -1261.98 CAD

The transaction completer will look at past entries to come up with a reasonable second posting; if it used the results of the deposit_in_transit plugin, it would use:

  Liabilities:Amex

as the second leg, while I want it to use the same account that I use in my beancount file, i.e.:

  Assets:DIT:Amex

Otherwise, I will end up with two entries (one from the bank statement and one from the credit card statement) describing the same transaction!

So, my solution would be to disable the deposit_in_transit plugin when using bean-extract.

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[Jeremy Maitin-Shepard]

It seems you could put everything, either directly or indirectly, in some journal-without-dit.beancount file, and then have another file journal-with-dit.beancount that contains your plugin directive and includes "journal-without-dit.beancount".

You might also be interested in https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import since it can handle merging matching entries sourced from different accounts, even with different dates.  The dates are currently recorded as a date metadata field on each posting, to allow for the postings to have different dates, although I don't do anything with them yet; once there would is a "standard" way to deal with or represent these dates it would be easy to migrate, though.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAKgGm2iQR3u8ttQw0hxugwa%3DGazqZH5v-cyGUSpQeu44qE5J-Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[Filippo Tampieri]

Hi Jeremy,

thank you for your suggestions.

I have actually written my own plugin to do what I described in this thread and am very happy with how it works.

https://bitbucket.org/fxt/beansoup/src/349e29f27ab613ee2e63d1916c3370e47a9f799c/beansoup/plugins/deposit_in_transit.py?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

I followed Martin's suggestion to access sys.argv from within my plugin to detect whether it is running within an importer.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAKJfoCHq2wCK7OgKMa-EP82s6XC0atE0qSENCKq%2BHPsLRaC%2B8A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Martin Blais]

A simpler and better solution would be for your plugin to mark your auto-generated transactions (or even the postings themselves) with metadata to leave a trace to indicate they're to be ignored by the plugin for learning.

[Filippo Tampieri]

That could work, but it would force the transaction completer to be aware of the metadata written by the deposit-in-transit plugin; not too cool, but I will think about it.

Tx

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