Hi, I'm not sure if this is the correct address for feature requests, but here goes. If I'm wrong, please let me know where I should send it. I've been testing Koha for our church library, and it looks like exactly what we need. However, I've noticed a database shortcoming that if addressed would make things a lot easier for me. The database tables Biblio and Bibliosubject are linked with the common field biblionumber, with a one-to-many relationship, allowing multiple subjects for a particular title. This is wonderful, but the list of available subject strings are not stored anywhere, and are entered manually. My thought is that there should be another table, say "subjects" that would contain two fields, a unique subject ID number, and a subject string. Then, replace the string "subject" in bibliosubject with the id number. This has multiple advantages... 1) It allows a universal subject name change to be easily implemented. For example, currently, if I want to change all instances of "FEMINIST THEOLOGY" with "FEMINIST DOCTRINE", I'd have to search and replace through every "bibliosubject" record. With the change, I would only need to change one "subject" record. 2) It allows for an exclusive list of subjects. I would hate to accidently misspell "Religien", and create a whole new field. If the "subject" table were exhaustive, only fields from that table would be allowed to be use. Please let me know your thoughts! Tom Albrecht III
Tom Albrecht a écrit:
Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the correct address for feature requests, but here goes. If I'm wrong, please let me know where I should send it.
I've been testing Koha for our church library, and it looks like exactly what we need. However, I've noticed a database shortcoming that if addressed would make things a lot easier for me.
The database tables Biblio and Bibliosubject are linked with the common field biblionumber, with a one-to-many relationship, allowing multiple subjects for a particular title. This is wonderful, but the list of available subject strings are not stored anywhere, and are entered manually. My thought is that there should be another table, say "subjects" that would contain two fields, a unique subject ID number, and a subject string. Then, replace the string "subject" in bibliosubject with the id number.
This has multiple advantages...
1) It allows a universal subject name change to be easily implemented. For example, currently, if I want to change all instances of "FEMINIST THEOLOGY" with "FEMINIST DOCTRINE", I'd have to search and replace through every "bibliosubject" record. With the change, I would only need to change one "subject" record.
2) It allows for an exclusive list of subjects. I would hate to accidently misspell "Religien", and create a whole new field. If the "subject" table were exhaustive, only fields from that table would be allowed to be use.
Please let me know your thoughts!
Tom Albrecht III
This is already in the CVS tree (if you don't know : cvs is our tool for development). I think/hope it will be distributed in a future 1.4 version. Not exactly what you ask for, but something like it... -- Paul
participants (2)
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paul POULAIN -
Tom Albrecht