[Koha-devel] itemBarcodeInputFilter or Client side JS?

[Koustubha Kale]

Hi All,
We are implementing Koha at a college. They have a existing software
for library. They have barcoded all their collection of about 150000
books with this software.
The peculiar thing about the software and the barcode it generates is this :

The barcode related data stored in the database of the software
backend ( MS SQL) is the item's accession number & item type. The
actual barcode is not stored anywhere.
The printed barcodes are like this B011364, B011436, AR011346,
AR011436,AR018100,AR018103,AR018104,AR018105. ( Note the duplicate
accession numbers)
The first alphabets correspond to the itemtype code stored in a table.
The remaining numbers are the accession number stored in a table
without the leading zeros. This causes a problem while migrating this
data to Koha due to the missing leading zeros and arbitrary length of
the string and the fact that accession numbers are same for different
item types.
While generating a barcode for a new item the software takes the
itemtype and the accession number and prints out a barcode label in
the required format.
When the barcode is read back in the softwares circulation module by a
barcode reader, a asp script on the server separates the item type and
the accession number, strips the leading zeros from the numeric part
and does a search on the database by means of a join on the two
tables.

As the college has stuck these barcode labels on all items, we have to
figure out how to emulate this functionality in Koha. (Post migration
we will generate & print barcodes from Koha; so we dont have to
emulate this logic in the barcode generation for Koha). I was thinking
we could store the barcode in Koha as itemtype-accession_number  (
without the leading zeros e.g. AR-18100) retrieved from the old
softwares database and when reading it in circulation in Koha we
convert the barcode from for example AR018100 to AR-18100.

I see two options to acchieve this..
options :
1) Create another filter for itemBarcodeInputFilter and modify the sub
barcodedecode  in C4/Circulation.pm
2) write a client side javascript to do it.

I would like to know is
1) What is the better way to acchive this?
2) Is there way for us to avoid a patch to Koha which will probably be
useless to anybody not migrating from this particular software. By
using opacuserjs perhaps..


Regards,
Koustubha Kale
Anant Corporation

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