Hi Ian,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 1:25 PM, Ian Walls <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:koha.sekjal@gmail.com">koha.sekjal@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">

Chris,<br><br><br>I&#39;ve been meaning to write a Contextual Preferences Engine for Koha for a while now, to solve the problems we have with the Circ Matrix, as well as with global sysprefs that should really be more configurable.<br>


<br>The idea is that it will be a DB table with 5 main columns:  Branch, Patron Category, Item Type, Key and Value.  Any of the first 3 can be a specific value or &quot;default&quot;.  If a contextual preference doesn&#39;t make sense to factor in one of the 3 values, it&#39;ll be ignored.<br>


<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Is the goal is to allow any or a defined set of system preferences to be &quot;contextualized&quot; based on branch, patron category, and/or item type?</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">

This, along with a rewritten editor and rules tester tool, would solve a bunch of our customizability problems in one go, without necessarily introducing too much complexity for users (provided we make a good interface).<br>


<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Agreed.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I hope to have a patch for this started after 3.8 releases (and all our DB revs are stable for a while).  Any help would be welcomed.<br>

</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Sounds good. I need this functionality to be in place by August of this year, so I&#39;m very interested in getting started as soon as possible. I will be carving out time during my workday for it over the next several months.</div>

<div><br></div><div>Kind Regards,</div><div>Chris</div></div>