Notes on commodity entries get converted to name

[alensiljak]

Hi!

My understanding from the Commodities description is that any metadata can be appended to the commodity declarations.
I have plenty of note attributes, with various descriptions and details.

Notes seem to be translated into name attributes, instead. I think it would be ok to leave them as-is.

In particular, when I have multiple note rows/entries, it makes no sense to call them name. I wonder what happens to them - i.e. are they stored in a dictionary entry or a set, where multiple attributes with the same name are allowed.

I've tried renaming the name: to note: and there are no complaints from bean-check.

[tbm]

This is something implemented by @zacchiro. @zacchiro do you remember why you did it this way? IIRC, name has some meaning in beancount whereas note does not?

I looked at beancount/beancount/core/data.py (v2) and only see:

Commodity = new_directive('Commodity', [
    ('currency', Currency)])

I don't see anything about name there but maybe it's somewhere else?

[tbm]

But yeah, at the very least, the l2b docs should explain why we change note to name. The docs say we do this but not why.

[tbm]

In particular, when I have multiple note rows/entries

Can you show an example? Is that even legal in ledger? I suspect they just override each other and the last one counts.

[alensiljak]

In particular, when I have multiple note rows/entries

Can you show an example? Is that even legal in ledger? I suspect they just override each other and the last one counts.

The note is not really used anywhere that I know, so it does not pose a problem.
I simply have multiple lines with, for example, the full symbol, contact details, the date of merger, full name of the fund, or whatever else.
Having a name for the actual name record is OK. But calling ISIN a name is wrong. Or a website URL, etc.

It is something that could easily be kept in comments, as well, but I'm just trying to work out how to solve this in the best manner.