[Koha-devel] new features for borrowers

[Paul POULAIN]

Hello all,
(& specifically joshua, the RM)

I was yesterday in OUEST-PROVENCE (called OP in this mail) to work with 
them on their version of Koha.
We all agree on the following position : developp as many features as 
possible to be in official CVS. Even if it means developping a little 
bit more parameters tables, to have a behaviour that anyone can use.

They worked on borrowers management, here is what they have done and 
will do in the next 2 weeks :
* in koha 2.x we had 3 kinds of borrowers : Adults, Institutions, 
Childrens. Those 3 kinds of borrowers where hardcoded (A, I, C), and not 
fully functionnal. OP has defined a new row in categories table : 
"cateogy_type". a category_type can be <A>dult, <C>hildren, 
<I>nstitution, <P>rofessional. The library can thus define in the 
database which catagories are what (and we can have more than 1 category 
for <C> for example : Baby, boy, girl,...)
* when a library want to add a borrower, it 1st must select what kind of 
borrower it want to add (A,I,C,P). Then the "member add" begins. Every 
category_type has it's own template. Add is divided in 3 parts :

PART 1 : general information : name, surname (where applicable), 
category (baby, boy, girl in my previous sample, if you choose 
category_type='C'), and *city*
The city refers to a new table with city/zipcode. The library can fill 
or ignore this table. If empty, the list does not appear. Otherwise, the 
list appear. Useful to put usefull a list of common cities your library has.

PART 2 : addresses (personnal, professionnal, parent's one...), 
including mail, fax, ... In the previous part, if a city has been 
choosen, zip and city name are automatically filled and can be modified 
if necessary.
The address has been modified to be separated in 3 parts : number, kind 
of road (avenue, road, place...), road name. The list of "road type" is 
defined in a separate table. If empty, once again, it does not appear.
Separating address in 3 parts will be a useful thing to have Geographic 
information on borrowers. OP plans to connect Koha to a Geographic 
Information Système (SIG in french) on the long term.

PART 3 : library use (opac note...)
nothing new or important here, if I don't mind.

On every PART value checking is done on client side (new behaviour, in 
javascript) AND server side (as previously). What is new and could be 
improved later is that the list of mandatory fields can be defined in a 
systempreference (zipcode is mandatory in France, for example, it's not 
is some countries)

Last note : OP will also reorganize the borrowers table to normalize 
fields names.
For instance, there are many addresses/zipcode..., each having it's own 
"nick". I suggested to adopt the following rules : each 
address/mail/phone/fax information begins with a A or a B, the A being 
"the most important one", the B being the alternative one.
For example : Aaddress1, Aaddress2, Azipcode, Acity...

Last note (2) : adding childrens : I suggested to add 3 ways to add a 
children :
- from the parent, add a children = in this case, the guarantorcode is 
kept, and the B adress is automatically set to the parent one.
- create a children from home page, and in PART 2, add a ... button to 
find the parent to set guarantorcode (and B address)
- create a children that has no parent in the database (no 
guarantorcode, and thus no B address automatically set).

This last behaviour being usefull for OP, as childs can subscribe to the 
library without their parents being members.

Expected timeline : code working in around 3 weeks (next week being 
holidays for OP developpers), but on default templates. We agree to let 
me install a copy on bureau.paulpoulain.com to let you see how it works, 
and commit code if everybody agrees.

Let me know your opinion on this. Joshua, I let you update release notes 
for 3.0
--
Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT
Consultants indépendants
en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)