Re: more intuitive forecast behaviour when there are no ordinary transactions ? (#1648)

[Simon Michael]

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/1648 -

ideas welcome from any --forecast users.

On Aug 8, 2021, at 8:26 AM, Simon Michael <notifi...@github.com> wrote:

Reviewing #1538, I expected this to show some forecasted transactions, even without specifying an explicit --forecast=PERIOD, because there are no ordinary transactions that would suppress them:

~ every friday
    (foo)                                          1.00 USD

$ hledger reg --forecast -b 2021/4/1 -e 2021/5/1

It took me two careful readings of the forecast period doc (hledger help forecast) to understand why it doesn't (forecast start date was defaulting to today):

Periodic transactions are generated within some forecast period. By default, this

• begins on the later of
  • the report start date if specified with -b/-p/date:
  • the day after the latest normal (non-periodic) transaction in
    the journal, or today if there are no normal transactions.

Wouldn't it would be more intuitive to show some transactions in the above case ? The rule could be:

• if there are normal transactions in the journal
  • begins on the later of
    • the day after the latest normal transaction
    • the report start date if specified
• if there are no normal transactions in the journal
  • begins on the report start date if specified, otherwise today

I think it is backward compatible and the user-visible behaviour is strictly more intuitive. However it now looks even more complicated. I wonder

• Is there a simpler way to describe it ?
• Is there a simpler rule that would be worth changing to ?