[Koha-bugs] [Bug 20878] Feature request: Add authorized value category for borrower category types

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=20878

Barton Chittenden <barton at bywatersolutions.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Resolution|---                         |INVALID
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED

--- Comment #2 from Barton Chittenden <barton at bywatersolutions.com> ---
(In reply to Katrin Fischer from comment #1)
> Hi Barton,
> 
> what is the use case? Those are hardcoded values you are not supposed to
> change, wouldn't it be confusing? It's also a problem as it would 'undo'
> translations. Right now those values are translatable where used.

Katrin,

I don't have too much of a use-case for this -- occasionally, I'll write
reports that make use of category_type, but even then, I'm probably only using
one of them (querying for adult patrons, or staff or children).

I guess it would be handy to have them in a drop down, a-la

SELECT count(*), s.ccode
FROM
   statistics s
   INNER JOIN borrowers p using (borrowernumber)
   INNER JOIN categories c using (categorycode)
WHERE
   s.type in ( 'issue', 'renew' )
   AND c.category_type = <<Patron Type|PATRON_TYPE>>
GROUP BY ccode

More than anything, I find having one-character values scattered throughout the
source code to be very confusing.

The authorised_values table acts as a controlled vocabulary for Koha... from a
support perspective, we get a lot of questions of the form "What does WRDL
stand for?", "I see 'F', 'FU' and 'PAY' among my fines, is that defined
anywhere?". Those are questions that tend to linger unanswered on mailing lists
because the people who know are busy and the people who don't haven't the first
clue as to where to look. Having these in the authorised_values gives a good,
consistent place for users to look for mysterious codes found in the database.

I'm going to go ahead and close this as invalid; I hadn't taken the aspect of
translations into account... but maybe we should consider making the codes that
we use internally to Koha more human readable?

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