On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 17:20 -0400, Galen Charlton wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Michael Hafen <mdhafen@tech.washk12.org> wrote:
This is an interesting question. On the one hand we have the desire to ensure valid data. On the other we can safely assume that the librarians know what they're doing. If they enter a date that is in the past it may be that they want it that way.
In programming we usually don't trust the user that much, but given the possibility I'd want to change this from an error to a warning if we do decide to check user input too.
So the question is: should librarians be able to enter an issue date in the past?
It depends. I can certainly envision cases where one might need to be able to manually enter such loans to fix problems or to enter loans that didn't get recorded in Koha for some reason. But outside of a possible scenario where you use offline circulation to handle bookmobile loans and for some reason upload the offline circulation files infrequently, I don't think this is something you'd want to do very often. Even if a *library* may need to do this occasionally, it's probably not something that you'd want your average circulation clerk or student worker to be able to do without authorization -- for one thing, being able to do this means being able to add automatic overdue penalties to a patron record -- so this question also ties into staff permissions.
I checked offline circulation, and process_koc.pl doesn't call CanBookBeIssued. It goes staight to AddIssue. Don't need to worry about that I guess. You point about staff permissions is a good one. I don't know if I want to get into making a sub-permission for entering due dates in the past. That's a bit much for a rarely, if ever, used feature. I guess I'll go ahead and move the check out of the block unless someone here asks otherwise. Thanks Galen.
I think CanBookBeIssued() should always check the supplied due date. If clients of CanBookBeIssued() need to ignore the date check under certain circumstances, they should be responsible for dealing with it.
Regards,
Galen -- Michael Hafen Systems Analyst and Programmer Washington County School District Utah, USA
for Koha checkout http://development.washk12.org/gitweb/ or git://development.washk12.org/koha