
                                Content
                                =======

               1.   What Is AqBanking ?
               1.1.   Generic Online Banking Interface
               1.2.   Generic Financial Data Importer/Exporter Framework
               1.3.   Bank/Account Information
               2.   Supported Platforms
               3.   Supported Backends
               3.1.   HBCI
               3.2.   OFX Direct Connect
               3.3.   EBICS
               3.4.   Paypal
               3.5.   None
               4.   What Do I Need ?
               4.1.   Required Packages
               4.2.   Applications
               5.   Building AqBanking
               5.1.   Building from the Tar File
               5.2.   Building from CVS/SVN
               5.3.   Building the API Documentation
               6.   Windows Registry Keys Used
               6.1.   Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\pkgdatadir
               6.2.   Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\sysconfdir
               6.3.   Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\bankinfodir
               6.4.   Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\providerdir
               6.5.   Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\importerdir
               7.   Environment Variables Used
               7.1.   AQBANKING_LOGLEVEL
               7.2.   AQBANKING_STORE_JOBLOGS
               7.3.   AQHBCI_LOGBOOKED
               7.4.   AQHBCI_LOGNOTED
               7.5.   AQHBCI_DEBUG_JOBS
               7.6.   AQOFX_LOG_COMM
               8 .  Using Your Own Profiles for Im-/Exporters
               9.   Thanks
               10.  Translation



1. What Is AqBanking ?
======================

AqBanking is a library for online banking and financial
applications. It has three major goals which are described in the
following paragraphs.

(Note: Information in German can be found on
http://linuxwiki.de/AqBanking )

The homepage of AqBanking is http://www.aqbanking.de/


1.1. Generic Online Banking Interface
-------------------------------------

The intention of AqBanking is to provide a middle layer between the program
and the various Online Banking libraries (e.g. AqHBCI, OpenHBCI etc). 

The real work is done in so-called banking backends. See chapter 3 for a
list of supported backends.



1.2. Generic Financial Data Importer/Exporter Framework
-------------------------------------------------------

AqBanking uses various plugins to simplify import and export of financial
data. It also provides the administration of profiles on a per import/export
plugin basis.

Currently there are plugins for the following formats:

- Importers:
  - DTAUS (German financial format)
  - SWIFT (MT940 and MT942)
  - OFX
  - CSV
  - OpenHBCI1 transactions
  - ERI
  - Q43
  
- Exporters
  - DTAUS (German financial format)
  - CSV


1.3. Bank/Account Information
-----------------------------

AqBanking supports plugins which allow lookup and verification of
bank code/ account id pair validity. For Germany the library
KtoBlzCheck is used for validation, but the bank information is
shipped with aqbanking.

Currently AqBanking provides informations about:
- ca 25,000 US banks
- ca 20,000 German banks
- ca  3,600 Swiss banks
- ca  2,300 Austrian banks

AqBanking also provides information about countries: Country name, ISO-3166
country code (both numeric and alpha) and currency information (ISO 4217
currency codes).



2. Supported Platforms
======================

AqBanking uses the library Gwenhywfar (http://www.aqbanking.de/) for 
abstraction of the underlying system. So it should work on any system for 
which Gwenhywfar is available. 

This includes (but is not limited to): 
 - Linux (of course ;-)
 - Windows (WIN32 platforms, such as Windows95 up to Windows XP)
 - MacOSX 10.5 and newer
 - most POSIX systems (such as the BSDs) should also be supported, 
   however, this is untested



3. Supported Backends
=====================

AqBanking includes all its currently known banking backends.


3.1. HBCI
---------

The backend AqHBCI provides support for the German online banking protocol
called "Homebanking Computer Interface". It is a national standard provided
by most German credit institutes.

The following security media are supported:
 - DDV chipcard (DES-DES-Verfahren)
 - RSA chipcard (RSA-DES-Hybrid mode)
 - OpenHBCI keyfile (either OpenHBCI 1 or 2, this medium allows continued use 
                     with OpenHBCI in parallel)
 - PIN/TAN (PIN/TAN mode using HTTP over SSL)

This backend supports the HBCI versions 2.01, 2.10, 2.20 and 3.00


3.2. OFX Direct Connect
-----------------------

This backend provides support for an online banking protocol used in the 
United States, Canada and maybe in the United Kingdom.


3.3. EBICS
----------

EBICS is the successor of the German banking protocol FTAM. It is used in commercial
environments. The tool AqBanking-CLI comes with optional support for this protocol.


3.4. Paypal
-----------

This backend uses Paypal's native API for retrieving transactions.


3.5. None
---------

This is a fallback module which can be used by applications for accounts which
are not managed by any online banking backend.



4. What Do I Need ?
===================


4.1. Required Packages
----------------------

AqBanking has several direct dependencies:

- "Gwenhywfar" >= 3.99.0, available from
http://gwenhywfar.sf.net/, is absolutely required

- "GMP", the GNU MP Bignum Library available from 
  http://gmplib.org/index.html is required for calculations

- "KtoBlzCheck" >= 1.0 from http://sf.net/projects/ktoblzcheck is
required for the German bank account number checking, otherwise
the account number checking will not be compiled.

- The python module "ctypes" http://sf.net/projects/ctypes is
required for the python wrappers of aqbanking. The python wrappers
are installed by default (to disable it, use --disable-python),
but they cannot be used unless "ctypes" is installed.


4.2. Applications
-----------------

These applications fully or partially support AqBanking:
 - AqFinance (http://www2.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqfinance/index.php)
 - QBankManager (http://www.aquamaniac.de/qbanking/, discontinued)
 - Gnucash (http://www.gnucash.org/)
 - KMyMoney (http://www.kmymoney.org/)
 - OrgaMon (http://orgamon.org/)
 - Pecunia 0.2 (http://www.pecuniabanking.de/Pecunia/Home.html)

The aqbanking package also includes several command-line tools
(aqbanking-tool, aqhbci-tool).



5. Building AqBanking
=====================


5.1. Building from the Tar File
-------------------------------

#>./configure
#>make
#>make install

(the last step most probably requires you to be root)

Compilation hints for specific platforms:

- For FreeBSD and potentially other non-Linux platform, it might be
  necessary to use "gmake" instead of the "make" program.

- Also, if your "make" program happens to complain about the variable
  definition "I18NFILES = $(shell cat ..." (in Makefile.in around line
  230) and related definitions, then you need to look for comments in
  the Makefile about "old make programs". Follow the instructions in
  these comments, i.e. set some variable definitions to an empty
  variable manually. This should remove all potentially incompatible
  directives from the Makefile.

- (especially on Mac/Darwin): If your configure run does not
  detect the QT libraries and it says "checking for qt3
  libraries... not found", then you need to specify the linker
  flags for qt3 manually in the env variable qt3_libs. I.e. if
  your qt3 library files are in /opt/qt/lib and is called
  libqt-mt, then you need to specify 
  ./configure qt3_libs="-L/opt/qt/lib -lqt-mt"


5.2. Building from CVS/SVN
--------------------------

#>make -fMakefile.cvs

and continue as described in "5.1. Building from the Tar File".


5.3. Building the API Documentation
-----------------------------------

#>make srcdoc

If you want to install a linked API documentation (which links against the
API documentations of the projects AqBanking depends on) use this:

#>make install-srcdoc

This installs the linked doc to the path you gave to ./configure
by "--with-docpath=PATH". It defaults to "$HOME/apidoc", which
means it does *not* obey the --prefix argument.



6. Windows Registry Keys Used
=============================

Some AqBanking versions might use registry keys below HKEY_CURRENT_USER.  
These are at the moment only versions shipped with GnuCash (at least that
used to be the case which is why handling of registry keys was introduced
in the first place). Most versions of AqBanking don't use the registry
to determine installation paths because those versions are filesystem
relocatable, so they don't need the registry.

At any rate, those versions that still do use the registry use the
following keys. These keys are created by the setup.exe which
contains the binary package for WIN32 platforms.


6.1. Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\pkgdatadir
-------------------------------------------
This is the data folder (i.e. $PREFIX/share/aqbanking on POSIX systems).


6.2. Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\sysconfdir
-------------------------------------------
This is the folder containing system configuration files.
(i.e. $PREFIX/etc on POSIX systems).


6.3. Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\bankinfodir
-------------------------------------------
This folder is used to store bankinfo plugins.


6.4. Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\providerdir
-------------------------------------------
This folder is used to store provider (backend) plugins.


6.5. Software\\AqBanking\\Paths\\importerdir
-------------------------------------------
This folder is used to store importer/exporter plugins.



7. Environment Variables Used
=============================


7.1. AQBANKING_LOGLEVEL
-----------------------

This variable stores the loglevel to be used for AqBanking.
Possible values are: emergency, alert, critical, error, warning, notice,
info, debug and verbous. Each following log level includes the previous
one.


7.2. AQBANKING_STORE_JOBLOGS
----------------------------
If this variable is defined then AqBanking will always store job logs with 
jobs. Otherwise job logs are only stored for jobs with a status other than
"finished". Job logs can become quite big.


7.3. AQHBCI_LOGBOOKED
---------------------
If this environment variable exists then the file "/tmp/booked.mt" is created
upon reception of transactions via the job GetTransactions. This file then
contains a SWIFT MT940 document which can be very helpfull in case there is
a problem in the SWIFT parser.


7.4. AQHBCI_LOGNOTED
--------------------
Same as AQHBCI_LOGBOOKED but for noted transactions (which are transactions
which are noted but not yet booked)


7.5. AQHBCI_DEBUG_JOBS
----------------------
If this variable exists then additional debugging data is stored with each
job.


7.6. AQOFX_LOG_COMM
-------------------
If this variable exists then all OFX communication is logged to /tmp/ofx.log.
This is only needed when debugging AqOfxConnect.
WARNING: This might expose your user id and password to everyone who can read
that file!




8. Using Your Own Profiles for Im-/Exporters
============================================

You can create your own profiles to be used with the various importers.
For AqBanking to recognize your private profiles they must be stored in
the user local folder. 
E.g. CSV profiles on Linux must be stored in 
"$HOME/.aqbanking/imexporters/csv/profiles/".



9. Thanks
==========

I wish to thank the following (among others) people for their support in 
making AqBanking work:
- Christian Stimming (build-system and tarball cleanup, translations, inputs)
- Jens Koerner (did some huge jobs to provide German translation)
- David Reiser (for helping in debugging the OFX DirectConnect code)
- Christoph Bohl (for helping with the YellowNet backend)

- and of course the many people who submitted bug reports !!



10. Translation
===============

To work on translation of this project you need the folowing packages on
Debian based systems:
- po4edit 
- translate-toolkit (for "msghack")

You can then create the necessary files with:
- make catalogs
- make merge

This will create the necessary *.pot and *.po files, the latter should then be
translated.


Martin Preuss, Wilhelmshaven/Germany, 2016/12/11

