[Koha-devel] Calculating priority for new hold requests

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

An issue that's bugged me for a while is the fact that AddReserve()
relies on the caller to set the priority of the request.  That
historically has meant that there are several different places in the
code where the priority is calculated, and the code duplication means
that there's a risk of it getting calculated slightly differently.
Furthermore, there's the potential for a race condition if the patron
or staff member takes a while to actually submit the hold request.

The patch for bug 8918 offers the potential start of an improvement
for this situation by defining a new central routine to calculate the
priority, although at present CalculatePriority() is used in only one
place.  However, I'd like to suggest that rather than simply expanding
the use of CalculatePriority(), that it instead by called by
AddReserve() and that the $priority parameter of AddReserve() be
removed.  This would have the effect of pushing each new request to
the end of the line (with variations for future holds and item-level
requests).

As near as I can tell, all of the places that call AddReserves()
alreay implement this policy (including serials/routing-preview.pl,
although indirectly).  However, I would appreciate a check of that
assumption.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
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