- Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Tidying admin directory : Call for comments before action. And overdue managemnt
by Henri-Damien LAURENT 23 Feb '06

23 Feb '06

Hi I will be playing with Koha 3.0, at last. First, one proposition that paul made which can be applied soon and fast. (discussed in head & code cleaning) If anyone has something to say against that, may he talk now or keep silence for ever. :) One directory for admin scripts called admin both in template and scripts hierarchy and an other for tools called tools both in template and scripts hierarchy. The second one is about overdue management. The idea is to have a new page in admin called overdue_rules.pl and taht wil consist in a table for each branch, as for issuingrules, which will be : delay1 Letter1 Debarred1 delay2 Letter2 Debarred2 delay3 Letter3 Debarred3 BorCat1 7 CODE1 NO 21 CODE2 NO 30 YES and so on and so forth. Have a nice day. -- Henri-Damien LAURENT

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New Feature: Sort by non-filing chars
by Joshua Ferraro 23 Feb '06

23 Feb '06

Hi all, I just committed some code that Stephen Hedges and I wrote a while back for the Nelsonville System along with a new systempref to manage it. The code allows a library to switch 'on' the ability to sort using the semantic information in the MARC non-filing chars. The code is really only relevant to the 2.2 branch and it seemed a shame to waste it. When we move to Zebra we'll use it, rather than SQL to do the sorting. One thing to keep in mind is that it's very proc intensive for a large collection (over 100,000 items). So much so that NPL only used it for a few weeks it was so slow. For the smaller systems though it is a nice feature and won't affect search speed. Also, it only sorts biblio.title, though it would be trivial to add support for other fields -- drop me a note if you have a specific need. In case you're wondering what non-filing characters are, some versions of MARC (like MARC21) specify the number of characters to ignore when sorting. So if your titles was 'The Jury', there would be 4 non-filing characters; if it was 'A tall tale' there would be 2 and so on. Finally, I should mention that this probably only works for MARC21, it's untested for UNIMARC but if you leave the syspref to its default of 'off' the code won't execute so it won't cause any problems. Let me know if anyone has questions about this ... Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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Acquisitions... Back again... and questions
by Henri-Damien LAURENT 21 Feb '06

21 Feb '06

Hi, I am trying to design parcel reception management. It is quite basic and should work for 2.2.6 and then backported to 3.0 BUT I am still facing some problems with ancient code. Is P&P requested ? What does it stand for ? Why is freight used for each order line (receive.pl line 62) ? I thought it was a fee you pay for the weight of the whole parcel. Am I wrong ? If some katipo guy could give my commited code a try in the next 10 days, and verify it really makes things better and not break over and over, I would be grateful. Have a nice day. -- Henri-Damien LAURENT

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Re: AMS Configuration for Koha
by paul POULAIN 21 Feb '06

21 Feb '06

Balasa Rodica a écrit : >Hello Paul, > > Hello Balasa, >Thank you again for the precious advice you gave me, and I write to you >again with a specific question, maybe you can help me with some advice. > >Discussing with the Institute of Mathematics management, the most >important feature of Koha would be to be able to store and search AMS >fields, that are specific to Mathematics science. > >I noticed that Marseille University has already implemented AMS: >http://bibcmi.univ-mrs.fr:8000/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl > >I thought maybe you encoutered this issue before, the search could be >obtained from configuration, or a modified version of Koha exists, and >if such, do you know where I could find it? > > It's a 100% pure Koha. (I made the CMI installation) There is another library using Koha with AMS (Limoges), and another one that should switch to Koha soon. Henri Damien and me have developped a tool to import AMS as a thesaurus in Koha. I can send it to you if you want (it probably needs some doc...) (cc: henridamien & koha-devel) -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Koha 3.0 Meeting Notes for February 20, 2006
by Joshua Ferraro 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

Hi all, Very productive meeting this week -- thanks to everyone for their participation, I think we have a clear work path outlined for this week. Here are the meeting notes: Present: thd, chris, kados, paul, rach, russ, bob PRELIMINARIES THD brought up Steven Baljkas concern about how the OPAC MARC view displays records where 650 is repeatable for example but all repeated field names appear only once with each of their respective contents appended. Therefore, in the OPAC MARC view 650 $a 650 $a $x 650 $a $x appears as 650 $a $a $x $a $x which looks as if everything had been dumped into one field and not repeated fields. we agreed that it's just a display problem, though it may lead some to conclude that the back-end storage is incorrect. THD and paul worked a bit on fixing the display PERL-ZOOM UPDATE We discussed perl-zoom as a 'drop-in' replacement for rel_2_2's Biblio.pm, SearchMarc.pm and marc* tables. Perl-zoom will NOT be required for 2.2.6, but will be an optional plugin for libraries who would like to try it out before Koha 3.0 is ready. We discussed necessary tasks remaining before perl-zoom is production- ready for a rel_2_2 system and who will work on these: Paul (Biblio.pm stuff): record deletion, add and delete items attached to a record Chris (Searching): clean up searching results pages, etc. details pages Josh (Zebra config): continue to work on collection.abs add zebra's 'safe updates' setting and find out how to use 'commit' Thd (Zebra config): work on unimarc collection.abs We discussed that we're not sure when to create/destroy the $Zconn object ... whether 'commit' should happen after a number of updates or after one. kados will send an email requesting clarification. Requests were made for a set of PROG templates for the OPAC, russ volunteered to do them if Owen is too swamped. UTF-8 PROBS Still no luck with this, problem has been confirmed from at least two sources. Suggested that if we can't get help from the package maintainer we should patch it ourselves and distribute it with 3.0. KOHA TABLES IN 3.0 Discussion about whether to get rid of the old koha tables in 3.0. Currently, the koha tables limit us to a 3-level deep holdings hierarchy -- but Stanard MARC Holdings seems to provide a n-level deep holdings hierarchy. We'll continue to discuss it and write up a prototype of how it should work and proceed from there. NEW FEATURES FOR BORROWERS Discussed OP's desire to add new features for borrowers to HEAD. We agree their modifs are a good idea and should be included in 3.0, though eventually we'll want to move away from the hard-coded categories. OTHER Russ announced that Katipo has recieved sponsorship for their new serials module and work on it will begin this week. Paul mentioned that he'll be working on 'late issues' this weeek, defining 3 levels of late issues warnings. He will also take a look at incorporating fines and 'email warnings'. If I've left anything out or misrepresented anything don't hesitate to let me know. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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head & code cleaning
by Paul POULAIN 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

Hello all, I think there are too many things in our admin directory/menu. Some of them are related to "low-level settings of Koha" (the one we set-up only once or almost : system preferences, branches, itemtypes...) Some are related to "high level settings of Koha" (the one we set-up rarely, something like once a year : funds, biblio frameworks) Some are related to "tools" (export, barcode printing, the new log viewer) I suggest splitting them in 2 different parts : parameters and tools. (maybe 3 is too much, but if you have another opinion, let me know) -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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BIG BIG problem (utf8 & mySQL)
by Paul POULAIN 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Hello, (I cc: mike Rylander in case the pines guys have another solution...) I continue investigating the utf8 stuff. I have a very very bad feeling : it seems that Perl DBI::mysql does not handle utf8 correctly. Here are some links : http://www.cpanforum.com/threads/654 http://lists.mysql.com/perl/3714 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=msql-mysql-modules&m=111970179409036&w=2 http://lists.mysql.com/perl/3006?f=plain If I read correctly, there are only 2 ways to solve this : * bug DBD::mysql maintainer to have the fix included. Would require an official release, an upgrade of DBD::mysql, but it's a better solution in the long term. * modify EVERY SQL query to Encode::decode_utf8() every value. A quite huge task ! I have modified one script (marc_subfield_structure.pl), and everything works fine with Encode::decode_utf8 (and don't work without it) -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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cvs head & templates
by Paul POULAIN 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Hello all, i've seen some commits related to npl templates. I thought we had decided to use PROG templates. Even if it is only for testing purposes, I strongly think we should all work with prog templates and only them. This will ease a lot testings for everybody. -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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utf-8, probable solution
by Paul POULAIN 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Thanks to Heikki Levanto, Tümer Garip & Mike Rylander, you pointed 3 things useless alone, but very useful when mixed. I think I have the solution to our problem. It's not a zebra or html::template or marc::record problem, it's a Perl one ! Let me explain : I followed my utf-8 string in my perl Code until printed and it was always utf-8 (\x9c...) But in firefox, it was iso8859-1. Heikki told me that the first 255 char were shared by unicode and iso8859-1. So, I told myself : OK, Paul, add a "true utf-8 character to your string". I choose \x{263a} (the smiley, because i'm always optimistic & that is what is used in perluniintro) Surprise ... now my é was a utf-8 é in firefox !!!! Conclusion : perl looked at my string before sendint it, and, as it finds it's not "true utf-8", Perl did something to change it in iso8859-1. I also had a brand new message in my log : > Wide character in print at ... Mike R. and Tümer G. suggestions make me investigate perldoc on unicode. and here it is : > A user of Perl does not normally need to know nor care how Perl happens to encode its internal strings, but it becomes rele- > vant when outputting Unicode strings to a stream without a PerlIO layer -- one with the "default" encoding. In such a case, > the raw bytes used internally (the native character set or UTF-8, as appropriate for each string) will be used, and a "Wide > character" warning will be issued if those strings contain a character beyond 0x00FF. > For example, > perl -e 'print "\x{DF}\n", "\x{0100}\x{DF}\n"' > produces a fairly useless mixture of native bytes and UTF-8, as well as a warning: > Wide character in print at ... > To output UTF-8, use the ":utf8" output layer. Prepending > binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); > to this sample program ensures that the output is completely UTF-8, and removes the program's warning. GOTCHA ! I have added binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"), and now, even without the smiley, my éà... are correctly shown. Still having to investigate mySQL utf-8, but it seems that > set NAMES=utf8 is useless. Thanks everybody for helping me. I'll continue this thread on koha-devel only, as zebra & perl4lib are not interested probably. -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Re:[Koha-devel] BIG BIG problem (utf8 & mySQL)
by Tümer Garip 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Hi, Our production system koha is utf8 on a windows platform. I do not know whether its different in Unix but here is the solution we found. Any read-writes to mysql is through biblio.pm so we saved the biblio.pm as an utf8 file. (Windows gives you the opportunity of saving a text file in ANSI(iso8859), utf8 or unicode(16bit).) This sorted out 2 problems: 1-Reading,writing from db and display is allways utf8 2- Char_decode subroutine works correctly when importing MARC into Koha I believe what this does is something similar to Pauls smiley solution simply and effectively. With this we did not even need binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8") either which is very cleverly debugged by Paul. Hope it helps, Tumer Garip >Paul wrote: >Hello, > > >(I cc: mike Rylander in case the pines guys have another solution...) > >I continue investigating the utf8 stuff. I have a very very bad feeling : it seems that Perl DBI::mysql does not handle >utf8 correctly. >Here are some links : >http://www.cpanforum.com/threads/654 >http://lists.mysql.com/perl/3714 >http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=msql-mysql-modules&m=111970179409036&w= 2 >http://lists.mysql.com/perl/3006?f=plain > >If I read correctly, there are only 2 ways to solve this : >* bug DBD::mysql maintainer to have the fix included. Would require an official release, an upgrade of DBD::mysql, but >it's a better solution in the long term. >* modify EVERY SQL query to Encode::decode_utf8() every value. A quite huge task ! > >I have modified one script (marc_subfield_structure.pl), and everything works fine with Encode::decode_utf8 (and don't >>work without it) -- >Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT >Consultants indépendants >en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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