Storing current circ policy in the loan record
Hi, There's been some discussion in the comments for bug 10120 [1] about the notion of storing whether an loan is hourly or not in the loan record itself. I'd like to expand this discussion to include the notion of storing a copy of all relevant circ policy in the loan. In particular, I'm thinking of - fine - finedays - chargeperiod - issuelength - lengthunit - renewalsallowed - renewalperiod - overduefinescap Doing this would help solve the immediate problem for bug 10120 of allowing us to (cheaply) determine if a loan is hourly and therefore should always have its fines recalculated upon checkin, but it would have some other advantages: - it would make it easier to decide if a given due date display should include the due time or not - it allows staff to change circ policies (and in particular, fine policies) without having to worry about affecting current loans. On the other hand, perhaps there are times when some libraries *do* want to make a policy change affect current loans -- I'd appreciate hearing about real life examples if this is the case. Another possibility would be simply storing a reference to the applicable policy. If we do it that way, we could give issuingrules an opaque primary key, but I think we'd then also have to have to teach that table how to keep track of old policy rows as well. Thoughts? [1] http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=10120 Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org
Those sound like good ideas to me! We could add a system pref for "follow rules from the time of checkout" vs "follow current rules". I think the opaque key isn't a bad idea either. Rules could be set to 'active' or 'inactive' so that previous checkouts could follow these inactive rules but new checkouts would ignore them. Kyle http://www.kylehall.info ByWater Solutions ( http://bywatersolutions.com ) Meadville Public Library ( http://www.meadvillelibrary.org ) Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org ) Mill Run Technology Solutions ( http://millruntech.com ) On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Galen Charlton <gmc@esilibrary.com> wrote:
Hi,
There's been some discussion in the comments for bug 10120 [1] about the notion of storing whether an loan is hourly or not in the loan record itself. I'd like to expand this discussion to include the notion of storing a copy of all relevant circ policy in the loan. In particular, I'm thinking of
- fine - finedays - chargeperiod - issuelength - lengthunit - renewalsallowed - renewalperiod - overduefinescap
Doing this would help solve the immediate problem for bug 10120 of allowing us to (cheaply) determine if a loan is hourly and therefore should always have its fines recalculated upon checkin, but it would have some other advantages:
- it would make it easier to decide if a given due date display should include the due time or not - it allows staff to change circ policies (and in particular, fine policies) without having to worry about affecting current loans.
On the other hand, perhaps there are times when some libraries *do* want to make a policy change affect current loans -- I'd appreciate hearing about real life examples if this is the case.
Another possibility would be simply storing a reference to the applicable policy. If we do it that way, we could give issuingrules an opaque primary key, but I think we'd then also have to have to teach that table how to keep track of old policy rows as well.
Thoughts?
[1] http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=10120
Regards,
Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
participants (2)
-
Galen Charlton -
Kyle Hall