Added Support for Date Type in Metadata

[patbakdev]

I needed to use a date type for the metadata. I tried passing in some datetime functions to the spray, but never got it to work pass the eval() function. So I just modified the code to try and convert to an ISO date and use it if successful. This probably means you can't use an ISO date as a string, but I assume that is the less common scenario. Maybe there is a better way to do this.

plugin "beancount_plugins_metadata_spray.plugins.metadata_spray" " {'sprays': [
          { 'spray_type': 'account_open',
            'replace_type': 'dont_overwrite',
            'pattern': 'Assets:.*',
            'metadata_dict': { 'cleared_before': '2019-08-07'}},
          { 'spray_type': 'account_open',
            'replace_type': 'dont_overwrite',
            'pattern': 'Liabilities:.*',
            'metadata_dict': { 'cleared_before': '2019-08-07'}},
          ]}"

[seltzered]

Very cool! Will try to review it more closely later next week.

[seltzered]

Haven't forgotten about this, honestly still wondering what's the cleanest way to handle this would be (stared at some ideas in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4235606/python-ast-literal-eval-and-datetime).

Does beancount officially treat metadata of YYYY-MM-DD as datetime dates? Was having trouble finding where the beancount codebase parsed for this.

[patbakdev]

According the the Beancount Language Syntax documentation (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmYZSygUaR0uOMW1GV3YE0/edit#heading=h.dplfcfjm39a1) metadata values can be any of the following data types:

• Strings
• Accounts
• Currency
• Dates (datetime.date)
• Tags
• Numbers (Decimal)
• Amount (beancount.core.amount.Amount)

I am not family with the inner workings of beancount or a python expert by any means. I was using another plugin (beancount_import I think) which required a date specific metadata. When I used a string it didn't work (probably a type mismatch error; I can't recall). So that was what drove my requirement. Hope that helps.