[Koha-devel] C4::Members Attributes tightener integration

[LAURENT Henri-Damien]

Joe Atzberger a écrit :
> I have mixed opinions about this.  On the one hand it seems 
> reasonable, and on the other it seems unnecessary.  There are only 
> three places that call AddMember: memberentry, import_borrowers and 
> Auth_with_ldap.  In fact, I recently coded a feature for a client so 
> that import_borrowers has a runtime option on how to handle extended 
> attributes (overwrite all, or preserve -- like other fields).  Making 
> a separate call for the attributes was not a serious problem.  LDAP 
> currently can't handle extended attributes, so there's no benefit there.
>
> This overwrite/preserve issue would need to be addressed in the 
> refactor also, to ensure that we know for sure what behavior is 
> expected when ModMember (in particular) is called.  In the case where 
> only extended attributes are being edited, it certainly is logically 
> simpler to have a call just for that, though that doesn't necessarily 
> preclude the kind of integration you propose.
>
> --Joe
<brain dumping>
My thought is that if we were aiming at standardizing work and getting 
more and more OOP, then we might find easier to use only one kind of API 
and not one API for each piece of data.
I am working on a special import for borrowers, but also on a 
subscription import. And it seems quite odd to me that we really use so 
different APIs to add a subscription or a Member. (I reckon I should 
also have suggested to unify AddSubscription and AddMember and 
ModSubscription and ModMember but was too much in a rash to do so and to 
achieve such a change at once.)
Moreover, if we are gaining more and more developers, we should think to 
get things more and more organized so that developing new features would 
be easier and not having to see many files in order to have a complete 
documentation on how to create a new patron.

And it would not be deleting C4::Members::Attributes, it would rather 
consists in wrapping calls to C4::Members::Attributes functions into 
Get/Add/Mod/Member
We could still call it on its own. But it would not be required to  
search the extended syspref and create Attributes in perl scripts.
The fact is that import_borrowers requires 2 different syntaxes for 
elements and those which are attributes, and those which are not, and it 
doesnot seems that necessary to me.
Since we should not be able to give a Patronattribute the same name as a 
borrowers.field name.
But maybe adding a patron attribute could split values on a delimiter so 
that an attribute can be repeatable.
name;surname;sort1;sort2;mylocalsortfield;
John;Doe;;;A,B,C,D;


</Brain dumping>
-- 
henri-Damien LAURENT