[Koha-devel] Discussion needed regarding holds circ rules.

[Barton]

Hi,

I wanted to bring up an issue that's been kicked around a fair amount on 
Bugzilla, and has not, as far as I can tell, received as much attention 
in terms of design as I believe it deserves: The interaction between 
holds (aka reserves) and circulation rules is broken:

see

* bug 10314 : CanItemBeReserved does not respect the holds policies.
* bug 4850: CheckReserves does not respect holds circulation policies
* bug 4045: No check for maximum number of allowed holds from OPAC [This 
was pushed to Master, but is only a partial fix].

I think that there are two things that are really at the heart of each 
of these issues:

1) We're using the system preference 'ReservesControlBranch' to 
determine which set of Circulation rules should apply. The choices are 
"Item's Home Branch" or "Patron's Home Branch". The problem is that 
we're essentially saying "You have the choice of which set of Hold Rules 
you want to ignore".  Unfortunately, these are not mutually exclusive: 
There's no way of saying "Choose the strictest set of hold limits"

2) Circulation rules apply to items, but Holds are biblio level objects. 
We make the decision about whether a hold may be filled on a bib record 
based on whether any of the items may fill the hold, bu t we're 
un-critical about the limits of that statement. If we say that a hold on 
a bib record may be filled, are we sure that we're re-checking to make 
sure that each item attached to the bib is holdable when we look again 
at the item level?

I'm sorry if I'm asking a frequently asked question here; I tried to do 
my due diligence with Google, and got a fire hose full of "not quite 
what I meant" :-)

Cheers,

--Barton