[Koha] importing issues into Koha

[Chris Cormack]

Hi Gavin

Gavin McCullagh wrote:

>  - The borrowernumber and itemnumber obviously relate to the primary keys
>    in items and borrowers.
> 
Yep

>  - Do all loans stay in this table indefinitely even after they are
>    returned? ie is this where the loan history is kept?
> 
Partially :-) See my answer to the questions below. The loans stay in 
this table after returned but its not where the totality of the history 
is kept.

>  - In terms of the dates, it looks like "date_due" is the current due date
>    (duh!), "returndate" must then be the date the book is returned -- NULL
>    initially, lastreneweddate is the date of last renewal.  If this is so,
>    do you store the date the book was first lent or not?  Also, do you
>    store the "renew history" of a given loan and where?
> 
Yes, but not in the issues table. In the statistics table instead.

The statistics table looks like this
 
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+
  | datetime            | branch | proccode | value  | type  | other | 
usercode | itemnumber | itemtype | borrowernumber |
 
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+
  | 2006-08-05 13:01:23 | L      |     NULL | 0.0000 | issue |       | 
NULL     |     139167 | BJN      |           8846 |
  | 2006-08-05 13:01:19 | L      |     NULL | 0.0000 | issue |       | 
NULL     |     136284 | BJN      |           8846 |
  | 2006-08-05 13:01:16 | L      |     NULL | 0.0000 | issue |       | 
NULL     |      76508 | BJN      |           8846 |
 
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+




>  - Do I guess correctly that there a single entry in this table per loan,
>    not one for the initial loan and one for every renewal?
Thats right a single entry per loan.

> 
>  - What exactly goes in the "return" field?
> 
Nothing currently.

>  - Is "renewals" an integer count of the number of times this particular
>    loan has been renewed?
> 
Yup

>  - Should the timestamp be updated every time any record is changed or at
>    record creation?
> 
MySQL does this for you.

>  - If I wanted statistics of how many loans/renewals were given out on a
>    given day some time ago, could I do this?  It appears not.
> 
Yes indeed, using the statistics table

EG
  select * from statistics where type='renew' and datetime > 
'2006-07-20' and datetime <='2006-07-21' limit 3;
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+
| datetime            | branch | proccode | value  | type  | other | 
usercode | itemnumber | itemtype | borrowernumber |
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+
| 2006-07-20 09:34:55 | S      |     NULL | 0.0000 | renew |       | 
NULL     |     121757 | NULL     |           NULL |
| 2006-07-20 09:41:06 | NULL   |     NULL | 0.0000 | renew |       | 
NULL     |      84985 | NULL     |           NULL |
| 2006-07-20 09:41:25 | NULL   |     NULL | 0.0000 | renew |       | 
NULL     |      35666 | NULL     |           NULL |
+---------------------+--------+----------+--------+-------+-------+----------+------------+----------+----------------+
3 rows in set (0.01 sec)

You can of course add and itemnumber=something as well.

So on your import you might like to populate the statistics table also.

Hope this helps

Chris