It's an interesting notion, albeit one that I think should be targeted for 3.4. The mechanism will be a bit risky, though; since the krz files can contain arbitrary Perl, they can do *anything* to a Koha database. In a sense, what you're proposing amounts to a general-purpose plugin system for Koha, with all of the benefits and security risks thereof.
Indeed. I had thought of that but the only solution I can think of is to have a koha.org sub-site for vetting and making available the krz files. I would also be nice if they could live outside the main codebase so they don't interfere with git ( though the way I've done it seems to be a common practice for cms's ). It would be great to have them in /var/koha/custom_reports or something similar. The same issue arose about the book cover caching system. Do you or anyone else on the list have any insight or recommendations?
I think another piece of metadata is needed - the minimum Koha version number required to run the report.
Excellent idea. I'll add that and create a wiki page for the format. Kyle http://www.kylehall.info Information Technology Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org ) On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Galen Charlton <gmcharlt@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.hall@gmail.com> wrote:
I've written a new "Custom Reports" addition for Koha to allow Koha users to trade more complicated reports that cannot be represented in pure SQL. Here's how it works:
It's an interesting notion, albeit one that I think should be targeted for 3.4. The mechanism will be a bit risky, though; since the krz files can contain arbitrary Perl, they can do *anything* to a Koha database. In a sense, what you're proposing amounts to a general-purpose plugin system for Koha, with all of the benefits and security risks thereof.
The report.ini file looks something like this: name=Access PA author=Kyle M Hall description=A Report of the data necessary to fill out the Access PA report form. start=access_pa/step1.pl
I think another piece of metadata is needed - the minimum Koha version number required to run the report.
Regards,
Galen -- Galen Charlton gmcharlt@gmail.com