[Koha-devel] Storing current circ policy in the loan record

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

There's been some discussion in the comments for bug 10120 [1] about
the notion of storing whether an loan is hourly or not in the loan
record itself.  I'd like to expand this discussion to include the
notion of storing a copy of all relevant circ policy in the loan.  In
particular, I'm thinking of

- fine
- finedays
- chargeperiod
- issuelength
- lengthunit
- renewalsallowed
- renewalperiod
- overduefinescap

Doing this would help solve the immediate problem for bug 10120 of
allowing us to (cheaply) determine if a loan is hourly and therefore
should always have its fines recalculated upon checkin, but it would
have some other advantages:

- it would make it easier to decide if a given due date display should
include the due time or not
- it allows staff to change circ policies (and in particular, fine
policies) without having to worry about affecting current loans.

On the other hand, perhaps there are times when some libraries *do*
want to make a policy change affect current loans -- I'd appreciate
hearing about real life examples if this is the case.

Another possibility would be simply storing a reference to the
applicable policy.  If we do it that way, we could give issuingrules
an opaque primary key, but I think we'd then also have to have to
teach that table how to keep track of old policy rows as well.

Thoughts?

[1] http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=10120

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
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