Chris, I'm curious how you would choose to approach this issue, strategically. Would you go at it this by adding a separate alternate routine for calculating due-times as opposed to due-dates? Or replace all due dates with hourly durations, then divide out the majority by whole days? I suppose the third choice might be to make hourly calcs the product of days divided by hourly period currently in effect ... Choices, choices ... Love to hear your thoughts. Erik On February 14, 2003 01:45 pm, Chris Cormack wrote:
Hi there
On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 04:28:21PM -0500, Shea Craig said:
I realize this is entirely not what Koha was designed for, but I haven't found anything else remotely close to solving my problems. I manage an equipment cage at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and use a really terrible software package called Athena for all of my circulation purposes. Anyhow, I want to switch to using Koha, but I have some questions and or ideas.
One thing that would be really useful would be to have the due date/month/year have a preferences setting that could have it automatically default to the current date, x number of days in advance, etc, depending on what format the item was, etc. (Athena does have this, but it doesn't work the way we need it to...) It's a real problem to have to specify this stuff every time something is checked out.
You'll be pleased to know this is how koha currently works :-) It uses a table called categoryitem in which the borrowers category code and the item being borrowed's type, are the keys to the rules for issue.
For example if a borrower of type A (adult) borrower an item of type YF (young adult fiction) it will see that item is allowed a 21 day issue period and set the due date to be todays date + 21 days.
So using the categoryitem table you can specify all the rules you need to achieve the above.
ALso, and this is very non-library related, we have a rather ridiculous checkout periods system in effect. All equipment checked out before 5 on any weekday must be back by 5, after 5 can be checked out overnight or be due back by 9:45, etc. So an hour:min setting for the due dates would be great too.
Hmm it doenst currently do this, but it certainly could. Ill have a play with it over the weekend
Chris
-- Erik Stainsby erik.stainsby@modern-alchemy.net Modern Alchemy: Better Libaries by Design http://www.modern-alchemy.net/