========================================
 FARE: Free Agent Reporter for Expenses
========================================

FreeAgent is a web-based service to track clients, work time,
invoices, bank accounts, and accounting reports.  It offers a growing
REST API.

We wanted a way to easily submit expenses so we wouldn't forget
them. We considered Mac dashboard widgets and iPhone apps, but we
might not always have the laptop out, and one of us doesn't have an
iPhone.  A very lean webapp could be displayed on any intelligent
phone, even the old Palm Treo one of use uses.

The home screen simply captures your authentication credentials::

  Domain:   mycompany   (under .freeagentcentral.com)
  Email:    myname@mycompany.example.com
  Password: ********

You will need to have created at least one bank account and enabled
REST API on your site to allow access (done under Settings -> API and
Feeds).

If it can successfully authenticate, it takes you to a page to gather
expense information::

  Account:     pulldown
  Amount:      in your currency
  Date:        YYYY-MM-DD
  Description: whatever your accountant and tax-man thinks wise
  Category:    pulldown

The accounts are loaded from the ones in FreeAgent. Currently the
Categories are hard-coded from HTML scraped from FreeAgent's site, as
I don't know a way to query for this with the REST API.

It then submits the information as an XML blob via HTTP POST, and
grabs the response code.  If successful, it will tell you.  

You can later check your FreeAgent site and see the expense in the
transactions.

This little app can't (yet?) view transactions or edit them.  Creeping
featurism is a worry.


TO DO
=====

* get expense types from URL query (each time? too big to store in session?)
* separate out form from template variables -- or use repoze.bfg.formish tool?
* Date Picker
* Expense (debit, default) vs. Credit (payment) radio button
* Put auth creds in session but not cleartext cookies!
  token = paste.auth.auth_tkt.AuthTicket('sharedsec', 'username', '1.2.3.4', user_data="subdom|password")
  token.cookie_value()
  token.user_data
* Make confirmation notice more humane: show details?
* O-wrap and slight styling
* More tests
* Put referral code into templates for us'n'them discount
* Make XML extractors generic, always return list of dicts of requested attrs
* get entries doesn't seem to limit by ?view=recent, more than 10

Probably not
------------

* Do I want to start adding timeslip creation? And other unrelated features?
* Would it have been easier to just re-skin FreeAgentCentral with
  something like Deliverance?
* No way yet in API to get an account's balance it seems

Getting BFG running simply for FARE with no DB
==============================================

Checkout the code from GitHub.

Make a virtualenv for it::

 /usr/local/python/2.6.4/bin/virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/.virtualenvs/fare
 source ~/.virtualenvs/fare/bin/activate

Follow the Repoze BFG instructuctions::

 easy_install -i http://dist.repoze.org/bfg/1.2/simple repoze.bfg

I can get a skeleton setup (without SQL or ZODB database)::

  paster create -t bfg_starter Fare
  cd Fare
  python setup.py develop

It didn't need to install anything that wasn't already installed by
the easy_install.  So perhaps I didn't need to do this, but it's nice
I don't have to create my own structure (setup.py, etc) from scratch.

I always forget about this, but you can get a python shell loaded up
with stuff your project uses::

  paster --plugin=repoze.bfg bfgshell Fare.ini main

Since I don't need a database (SQL no ZODB) I don't need models. So
I've removed a bunch of stuff, leaving mostly the .ini file, run.py
and the fare.py which implements the views. I probably could rename
that to views.py so it is more familiar to BFG developers.