[Koha-devel] [PATCH] Custom Reports

[Kyle Hall]

> It's an interesting notion, albeit one that I think should be targeted
> for 3.4.  The mechanism will be a bit risky, though; since the krz
> files can contain arbitrary Perl, they can do *anything* to a Koha
> database. In a sense, what you're proposing amounts to a
> general-purpose plugin system for Koha, with all of the benefits and
> security risks thereof.

Indeed. I had thought of that but the only solution I can think of is
to have a koha.org sub-site for vetting and making available the krz
files. I would also be nice if they could live outside the main
codebase so they don't interfere with git ( though the way I've done
it seems to be a common practice for cms's ). It would be great to
have them in /var/koha/custom_reports or something similar. The same
issue arose about the book cover caching system. Do you or anyone else
on the list have any insight or recommendations?

> I think another piece of metadata is needed - the minimum Koha version
> number required to run the report.

Excellent idea. I'll add that and create a wiki page for the format.

Kyle

http://www.kylehall.info
Information Technology
Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org )




On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Galen Charlton <gmcharlt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  I've written a new "Custom Reports" addition for Koha to allow Koha
>> users to trade more complicated reports that cannot be represented in
>> pure SQL. Here's how it works:
>
> It's an interesting notion, albeit one that I think should be targeted
> for 3.4.  The mechanism will be a bit risky, though; since the krz
> files can contain arbitrary Perl, they can do *anything* to a Koha
> database.  In a sense, what you're proposing amounts to a
> general-purpose plugin system for Koha, with all of the benefits and
> security risks thereof.
>
>> The report.ini file looks something like this:
>> name=Access PA
>> author=Kyle M Hall
>> description=A Report of the data necessary to fill out the Access PA
>> report form.
>> start=access_pa/step1.pl
>
> I think another piece of metadata is needed - the minimum Koha version
> number required to run the report.
>
> Regards,
>
> Galen
> --
> Galen Charlton
> gmcharlt at gmail.com
>