On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:27:20 -0800 (PST), Yohannes Mulugeta <yohannesmulu@yahoo.com> wrote:
we are trying to add items to the biblio but it accepts the same barcode number for different items. Can any body help us?
you can run the following sql statement to enforce uniqueness of barcodes. alter table items change barcode barcode varchar(20) not null unique; you must of course do this from the mysql client - example $ mysql -u root -p Koha Password: ....... mysql> alter table items change barcode barcode varchar(20) not null unique; ERROR 1062: Duplicate entry '' for key 2 mysql> if you have any duplicates or empty barcodes when you try to run the sql command, it will stop with an error like this. you must fix all the duplicates before it will work. unfortunately NULL == NULL, so if you want to require that all barcodes be unique, you must also require that they be supplied (not null). that's what the error in the example above means: the first record has a null barcode, and so does the second. that's not unique! so "fixing all the duplicates" as i said above also means making sure every item has a barcode. the requirement to enter barcodes (and to have unique ones) was removed in Sept. 2003, for those who don't wish to use them in their libraries i presume (anyone else, jump in here...). you can see the changes to the code of the updater script at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/koha/koha/updater/updatedatabase?r1=1.58&r2=1.59