Good afternoon Katrin!

Let's start with the backend: this is just a simple script that fills the calendar ahead of time (waaay ahead of time) to allow the user to modify schedules easily.  1 year is just a hardcoded value, it could as well be an argument allowing any number of days in the future.  Same for the past: during updatedatabase, this creates one but could create two years in the past based on the info in the current calendar tables.  In the end, the point is to have a table entry for each day, specifying which day it WAS opened (for hourly fine calculation) and which day it will be opened (for hourly checkout or just for displaying the library open hours on the OPAC).  Going a year in the future, things are a bit dumb when creating, but always replicate the week before, except for items with notes (holiday) that are fetched on the calendar year a year before.  Then the librarian has plenty of time to adjust anything.

Which brings us to the UI.  Mine is ugly, but it would be easy to create a nice one AND SIMPLE one (coding) and powerful one (for users).  With that simple backend, it's very easy to simply allow multiple selections in the calendar widget, the modify opening hours, or holiday close with a note.  Or better: select a week anywhere in the calendar, then copy that to a given range.  3 days, a month, 3 months...   Very simple in the UI, very few clicks.  Very simple to code in the backend.

So in the end, recovering the original work or Kyle's work or defining new standard, we have a calendar page with a simple calendar and below it a few edit box (opening hours, closing, notes, closed checkbox) and a apply button.  On the right, like right now, we can display all "special dates", which are the ones with a "note" entry.  In yellow those that are on days still opened, in pink those days that are marked as closed.  Of course, all UI schemes are very open to suggestion.  But it would be simple and naturally intuitive.

THEN we get to the performance benefits I'm striving for....

Right now, my first step would be to create a patch that creates the new table and modify the Koha/C4 Calendar modules to seed the new one with any modification of the old ones.  So no impact on current behavior.  Then second step would be to create the new UI, without touching the old one.  THEN next step would be to transfer the functionnality usages.  Basically in reverse order of what I have available right now.  :-)

Philippe Blouin,
Responsable du développement informatique

Tél.  : (888) 604-2627
philippe.blouin@inLibro.com

inLibro | pour esprit libre | www.inLibro.com
On 07/24/2016 04:42 PM, Katrin Fischer wrote:
Hi Philippe,

thx for trying to get things moving again - I know there are quite a lot
calendar related bugs to be found in bugzilla.

Can you explain a bit about how this would change the GUI for the users?
Do you have to keep it up to date or does the table get filled
automatically for recurring events?

I am a bit concerned about the limitation of one year into the past and
one year into the future. What happens if a due date goes beyond that or
an item is overdue before that?

Katrin

Am 21.07.2016 um 18:43 schrieb Philippe Blouin:

Hi!

I'm throwing a line here, and I'd just like to get a feel for the value
of offering some work to the community.  Mind you, the work is "big" so
honest responses could save us lot of wasted hours.

We've developed a parallel calendar table to specify each individual day
if it's opened or not (instead of rules and exception).  We added to it
the opening hours, and keep a year of them in the past, and a year in
the future.
The reasonning being:
- We need the opening hours.  They need to vary season to seasons.  We
need them for hourly and minute loans.
- Exception and holidays and etc... are complicated.  To manage, to
calculate, to fix.  We need the past info as well, to calculate precisely.
- Performance.  Calculating with C4/Koha Calendars is sloooooooooow. 
Our little table cut fines.pl calculation times by 97%.  Not a typo. 
Checkout improvement by 30-60% but metric is unreliable so take with
grain of salt this one.

So before I go and write a wiki RFC, then open bugzillas, make the code
community acceptable (we're not using Schemas), complete it, write
tests, etc...  Is there an interest?  Would it answer a need (outside of
our clients) ?  Maybe a subset? 

All comments, suggestions, questions are welcomed.

High regards,

Philippe Blouin,
Responsable du développement informatique

Tél.  : (888) 604-2627
philippe.blouin@inLibro.com <mailto:philippe.blouin@inLibro.com>

inLibro | pour esprit libre | www.inLibro.com <http://www.inLibro.com>



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