[Koha-devel] Bug reporting by amateurs

[Roger Horne]

In 
file:///usr/local/koha/intranet/scripts/misc/release%20notes/release_notes_200RC2.txt
it was said that known bugs included

* autobarcode not calculated even if autobarcode system parameter is set and 
MARC=on.

It seems that this has not been solved as yet, at any rate if MARC=off. It is, 
to put it mildly, annoying to find that if one enters a biblio manually using 
acqui-simple that one has to invent a barcode to be able to enter the new 
data and that if one fogets to do so one has to start all over again.

The problem is, I think, that the no-marc pages require that a barcode be 
entered when starting even though koha should be producing one manually at a 
*later* stage.

I found that commenting out the lines 

 elsif ((! $barcode) && (! $website)) {
    print        
$input->redirect("additem-nomarc.pl?biblionumber=$biblionumber&error=nobarcode");
}

at line 73 of /usr/local/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/acqui.simple/saveitem.pl

enabled the program to save the data correctly so that it could be found on a 
subsequent search (with either opac or intranet). Presumably a safer option 
would involve a check that included whether autoBarcode was true but I did 
not feel up to that at the time.

This alteration did not cause Koha to generate the missing barcode. So on 
looking at the output of a search the line containing the barcode was blank.

A search for autoBarcode did however throw up an anomaly. Line 93 of 
aqui.simple/additem.pl reads:
	if (C4::Context->preference('autoBarcode')) {
while line 102 of cgi-bin/aqui/aquire.pl reads:
	my $auto_barcode = C4::Context->boolean_preference("autoBarcode") || 0;

Changing the former to 
	if (C4::Context->boolean_preference('autoBarcode')) {
seems to do something different since a search produces an error "Sorry that 
barcode is already in use" although I could not get it to tell me what the 
barcode was: I doubt that there was one..

(So could the appropriate change to saveitem.pl be the addition of &&(!
C4::Context->boolean_preference('autoBarcode' ))  (together with use 
C4::Context)? It seems to work.)

Trying to take this further is beyond me but I suppose it might be of interest 
to someone else. The two different ways of (possibly) calculating the barcode 
in the two files defeat me at the moment.

So how should someone who is not sure what he is doing report this sort of 
possible (partial) start of a solution to a known problem? 

Roger
-- 
Roger Horne
roger at hrothgar.co.uk
http://hrothgar.co.uk/YAWS/