[Koha-devel] GetMember() cardnumber vs. firstname search

[Paul POULAIN]

Galen Charlton a écrit :
> Hi,
Hi,

> C4::Members::GetMember(), when used to look up a patron by cardnumber,
> retries the search on borrowers.firstname if there are no rows that
> have the barcode in borrowers.cardnumber.
> 
> This is not exactly beautiful, and I assi,e it was inspired by some
> library that for whatever reason needed to overload the firstname
> field.  Does anybody know of a reason (or a current user) why this odd
> fallback should be retained?

Why do you find that not beautiful ?
 From a perf pov, it's efficient : do an exact search, and if you don't 
find anything, open the search.
There is only one problem with that : if a patron has barcode=surname, 
then a search on surname returns only this patron.

We have one library that recently asked us "why, when I search vita", do 
I get only 1 result, instead of 3 as expected, as my childrens are 
members of the library as well.
The answer was : your cardnumber, as librarian, is vita (not a true 
cardnumber). "Standard" patrons have a numeric cardnumber. Not a surname.

which is quite confusing, I agree. But it was the 1st time someone rised 
the problem.

-- 
Paul POULAIN
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