[Koha-devel] feasibility of external circulation updating Koha items table availability

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

2010/2/17 Christopher Curry <ccurry at amphilsoc.org>:
> First, am I correct that updating the availability status of an item in the
> Koha Opac requires only that we update this field (items.onloan)?

No, that's not sufficient - it would also be necessary to update the
952 field in the MARC bib record corresponding to that item so that
the item status change can be indexed.  Running
misc/maintenance/sync_items_marc_bib.pl periodically would do it, with
some tweaking to update only the bibs whose items have been updated
from Aeon.

> Second, in order to generate the SQL query, something like "UPDATE items SET
> onloan=2010-03-10 WHERE itemnumber=706," we'll need access to the itemnumber
> from within the OPAC record in order to generate the OpenURL that Aeon uses
> to generate requests.  Is this variable available from within the
> opac-results.tmpl and opac-details.tmpl templates?  Can someone tell me how
> I can call this data?

itemnumber is available to opac-details.tmpl.  It is not directly
available in the search results, but (assuming you use the XSLT
option), a small tweak of buildKohaItemsNamespace() C4/XSLT.pm and a
change to the stylesheet would make it available.

> On that note, does any documentation exist detailing bib/item data variables
> like this that can be called from within Opac templates?

I don't know of anything that systematically documents that, I'm afraid.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
gmcharlt at gmail.com