Parameters in Query Directive?

[Henry Mitchell]

Hi,

I am tinkering with migrating from ledger to beancount. In bean-query, I see I can run a query defined as a directive in my ledger with ".run query-name". Is there a way to have the query take a parameter and pass it in from beanquery?

As a trivial example, suppose I wanted to pass a number to limit here:

2100-12-31 query "foo" "select date limit %d"

Can I do so? Various attempts at ".run foo 3" seem to fail.

[Henry Mitchell]

Hi,

Are query directives and bean-query not intended to be used this way? Or is this documented somewhere and I failed to find it?

[Justus Pendleton]

No, there is no way to use parameters in queries in that way. It would be a nice thing to add though, so you might check the bean-query project and see if there's already an existing request for something like that and voice your support.

[Martin Blais]

That is indeed a great idea

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[Henry Mitchell]

Thanks for confirming this is not supported. I looked through the issues but did not see anything like it so filed https://github.com/beancount/beanquery/issues/249

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[Martin Blais]

Vibecode it!  

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[Alexandre Janniaux]

As a side note, positional argument feels brittle here since it's not really
a software developement context. I'd suggest this kind of syntax:

```
2100-12-31 query "foo" "select date limit {limit=somedefaultvalue}"
limit: "Number of records to return"
```

and command would be `.run foo limit=3`. Then documentation and reporting
for errors would be much more convenient.

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[Alen Šiljak]

A bit OT but could someone briefly explain what is the purpose of having queries *inside* the journal? Somehow I can't imagine any scenario for this and would appreciate if someone would enlighten me. Perhaps there are some useful use cases.

That said, my general approach is to separate code from data as cleanly as possible/practical. I guess that was one of the points of Plain-Text Accounting, but whatever.

[Martin Blais]

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 4:58 PM 'Alen Šiljak' via Beancount <bean...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

A bit OT but could someone briefly explain what is the purpose of having queries *inside* the journal? Somehow I can't imagine any scenario for this and would appreciate if someone would enlighten me. Perhaps there are some useful use cases.

For queries you want to run often, you can just save them in the file and recall them by name.

It's a way to define based named reports in the ledger itself.

That said, my general approach is to separate code from data as cleanly as possible/practical. I guess that was one of the points of Plain-Text Accounting, but whatever.

You can do that too

 

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