Overdues notices and fines: what scripts are supposed to work?
I've just started looking into emailing overdue notices to our members. I tried out the overduenotices.pl script but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't get any output when I run it with the -n parameter (no email, output to stdout) but I also don't get any errors. Does anyone have this working correctly in 2.2.9 (Debian Sarge)? The documentation at kohadocs.org seems to suggest that since version 2.2 none of the scripts for calculating fines work. Is this true? -- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
I've just started looking into emailing overdue notices to our members. I tried out the overduenotices.pl script but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't get any output when I run it with the -n parameter (no email, output to stdout) but I also don't get any errors. Does anyone have this working correctly in 2.2.9 (Debian Sarge)? OK, I just realised that it checks the "Overdue notice required" flag in
Kevin O'Rourke wrote: the borrower category, for some reason all ours were set to "no".
The documentation at kohadocs.org seems to suggest that since version 2.2 none of the scripts for calculating fines work. Is this true? I'm still curious which fines script I should use.
-- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
Hi Kevin, ----- "Kevin O'Rourke" <lists@caboose.org.uk> wrote:
I've just started looking into emailing overdue notices to our members. I tried out the overduenotices.pl script but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't get any output when I run it with the -n parameter (no email, output to stdout) but I also don't get any errors. Does anyone have this working correctly in 2.2.9 (Debian Sarge)? OK, I just realised that it checks the "Overdue notice required" flag in
Kevin O'Rourke wrote: the borrower category, for some reason all ours were set to "no".
The documentation at kohadocs.org seems to suggest that since version 2.2 none of the scripts for calculating fines work. Is this true? I'm still curious which fines script I should use. The fines module in Koha is a fine example of a feature that hasn't been fully exposed to the system administration section of the admin interface. For now, the assumption is that if you need to enable fines and you're managing Koha yourself (as opposed to getting commercial support from one of the available providers), you'll be spending some time customizing the fines script and module to suit your needs. That said, have a look at the fines2.pl in misc/ that relies on C4/Circulation/Fines.pm, it's a good example of how to start out with fines management in Koha.
Hope that helps. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
Joshua M. Ferraro wrote:
The documentation at kohadocs.org seems to suggest that since
version
2.2 none of the scripts for calculating fines work. Is this true?
I'm still curious which fines script I should use.
The fines module in Koha is a fine example of a feature that hasn't been fully exposed to the system administration section of the admin interface. For now, the assumption is that if you need to enable fines and you're managing Koha yourself (as opposed to getting commercial support from one of the available providers), you'll be spending some time customizing the fines script and module to suit your needs. That said, have a look at the fines2.pl in misc/ that relies on C4/Circulation/Fines.pm, it's a good example of how to start out with fines management in Koha.
Thanks for the information. So it looks like the documentation is wrong and fines2.pl does work, but needs customisation. I've had a look at it and it's not pretty, there are far too many magic numbers in there. For example, there's a maximum fine variable buried in the code, set to 5. However, here in Nigeria that's far too low (there are about 130 Naira to the US Dollar). If I had the time I'd rewrite it to read things out of system preferences. Would I be right in saying that for each "fine cycle" (7 days or whatever) this will add an additional line item to the borrower's record? Getting support from one of the available providers would be great, but Nigerian educational organisations just don't have the money. -- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
----- "Kevin O'Rourke" <lists@caboose.org.uk> wrote:
Joshua M. Ferraro wrote: The fines module in Koha is a fine example of a feature that hasn't been fully exposed to the system administration section of the admin interface. For now, the assumption is that if you need to enable fines and you're managing Koha yourself (as opposed to getting commercial support from one of the available providers), you'll be spending some time customizing the fines script and module to suit your needs. That said, have a look at the fines2.pl in misc/ that relies on C4/Circulation/Fines.pm, it's a good example of how to start out with fines management in Koha. Thanks for the information. So it looks like the documentation is wrong and fines2.pl does work, but needs customisation. I've had a look at it and it's not pretty, there are far too many magic numbers in there. For example, there's a maximum fine variable buried in the code, set to 5. However, here in Nigeria that's far too low (there are about 130 Naira to the US Dollar). If I had the time I'd rewrite it to read things out of system preferences. I'm not sure which documentation you're referring to, but yes, the fines stuff in Koha could definitely use a re-write.
Would I be right in saying that for each "fine cycle" (7 days or whatever) this will add an additional line item to the borrower's record?
Getting support from one of the available providers would be great, but Nigerian educational organisations just don't have the money. I understand completely. Lack of money is a challenge that us providers face as well :-). Since you've been given the opportunity to work on Koha, perhaps you'd be able to share your solutions with the community. It's exciting to hear that the educational organizations in Nigeria have decided to invest in the project, we're always looking for new programmers to join the effort. Welcome :-).
Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
Joshua M. Ferraro wrote:
I'm not sure which documentation you're referring to, but yes, the fines stuff in Koha could definitely use a re-write.
http://www.kohadocs.org/command_line_scripts.html - lots of comments about things not working in version 2.2.
I understand completely. Lack of money is a challenge that us providers face as well :-). Since you've been given the opportunity to work on Koha, perhaps you'd be able to share your solutions with the community. It's exciting to hear that the educational organizations in Nigeria have decided to invest in the project, we're always looking for new programmers to join the effort. Welcome :-).
We're just one of the teacher training organisations here, other organisations are either implementing their own systems or none at all. The typical college library in Nigeria has very few books and those are usually kept in a locked cabinet to ensure no-one can spoil them :-) -- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
If you are interested, I've written alternative fines and overdues generators that are part of koha-tools ( http://kylehall.info/index.php/projects/koha-tools/ ). The fines generator creates fines for an item upon the return of an item, rather then generating fines each night. That means that each item will only have one fine listed that totals the amount due, rather than a fine for each day overdue. This more closely emulates our previous ILS and our librarians preferred it. The overdues generator allows you to specify the period of 'overdueness' and allows one to create a shelf list to check for items that might have been accidentally shelved without first being returned, and also a pdf of nicely formatted notices to mail out. Both of them are written in PHP rather than Perl, and that's why I've kept them in a separate project rather than as part of the Koha repository. Kyle On 5/30/07, Kevin O'Rourke <lists@caboose.org.uk> wrote:
I've just started looking into emailing overdue notices to our members. I tried out the overduenotices.pl script but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't get any output when I run it with the -n parameter (no email, output to stdout) but I also don't get any errors. Does anyone have this working correctly in 2.2.9 (Debian Sarge)?
The documentation at kohadocs.org seems to suggest that since version 2.2 none of the scripts for calculating fines work. Is this true?
-- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
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Kyle Hall wrote:
If you are interested, I've written alternative fines and overdues generators that are part of koha-tools ( http://kylehall.info/index.php/projects/koha-tools/ ).
The fines generator creates fines for an item upon the return of an item, rather then generating fines each night. That means that each item will only have one fine listed that totals the amount due, rather than a fine for each day overdue. This more closely emulates our previous ILS and our librarians preferred it. That sounds very interesting. Having to run cron jobs for things like fines is one of the parts of Koha that seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Both of them are written in PHP rather than Perl, and that's why I've kept them in a separate project rather than as part of the Koha repository. I'm a little bit concerned about adding separate things like this to our Koha setup, especially when the download is only possible from a Subversion repository.
I can deal with all these things, but I'm only here until September so I'm trying to keep the system as easy to deal with as possible. Thanks -- Kevin O'Rourke ICT Coordinator, National Teachers' Institute, Kaduna, Nigeria 062 316972
participants (3)
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Joshua M. Ferraro -
Kevin O'Rourke -
Kyle Hall