Hi, 2010/2/17 Christopher Curry <ccurry@amphilsoc.org>:
First, am I correct that updating the availability status of an item in the Koha Opac requires only that we update this field (items.onloan)?
No, that's not sufficient - it would also be necessary to update the 952 field in the MARC bib record corresponding to that item so that the item status change can be indexed. Running misc/maintenance/sync_items_marc_bib.pl periodically would do it, with some tweaking to update only the bibs whose items have been updated from Aeon.
Second, in order to generate the SQL query, something like "UPDATE items SET onloan=2010-03-10 WHERE itemnumber=706," we'll need access to the itemnumber from within the OPAC record in order to generate the OpenURL that Aeon uses to generate requests. Is this variable available from within the opac-results.tmpl and opac-details.tmpl templates? Can someone tell me how I can call this data?
itemnumber is available to opac-details.tmpl. It is not directly available in the search results, but (assuming you use the XSLT option), a small tweak of buildKohaItemsNamespace() C4/XSLT.pm and a change to the stylesheet would make it available.
On that note, does any documentation exist detailing bib/item data variables like this that can be called from within Opac templates?
I don't know of anything that systematically documents that, I'm afraid. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton gmcharlt@gmail.com