Add Flag to Set Start/End Dates to Earliest/Latest Day of Year

[prikhi]

Currently, the start/end dates are based on the entry dates in the journal file. Start is the earliest entry's date, end is the last entry's date.

Add a new flag to set the start/end dates to the first day of the earliest year and the last day of the latest year, respectively.

[cgo]

That is actually something that I was missing just now!

[prikhi]

@cgo Would you want something like --year 2022 to fetch all prices for only 2022, or something more general like --year to expand the start/end dates to Jan 1st of the earliest year in the journal & Dec 31st of the latest year in the journal?

[cgo]

@prikhi thanks for coming back! I was thinking more along the lines of --period (and then a time period), and one option that fetches prices newer than the latest recorded price that is already in the target journal file.
So that each time I want to get the latest prices, not all the date range has to be fetched.
Not sure that is understandable enough, does this make sense to you?

[prikhi]

Yes something like --period "2022-01 to 2022-06" for fetching the first 6 months of 2022? And a separate option like --newer-only that would output prices for 2022-04-21 -> today if the last price directive in the journal was for 2022-04-20?

We actually don't have to worry about fetching too many prices - AlphaVantage always returns all the history they have in one single API call, our code then filters the response for the dates we care about.

That said, either of those flags will take a bit more time to implement compared to --year YYYY or --full-years flags, especially if --newer-only should generate date ranges on a per-commodity basis. I'll have to see if the hledger library exposes something that would make implementing --period trivial.

[simonmichael]

It's nice for users when addons can provide flags somewhat consistent with hledger's. periodFromRawOpts could be a useful helper here, but it's not exported. We should change that.

[cgo]

Yes something like that, and more like what @simonmichael was saying in his reply I guess.

Interesting that Alphavantage is just sending all they have, I didn't know that. Seems a bit wasteful on their side.