[Koha] I'm confused about where normal view customization occurs

[Doug Dearden]

Hi Owen,

Any idea why my Koha install would not show the $b field in the title under the Normal view the way yours and Rachel's does?  I noticed she is on a later release than I am.  I installed the release marked stable last December.  I notice there is a newer one marked stable on the download.koha.org page, though the links on the main site look like they need to be updated.  

Would having Zebra turned on make a difference?  I am not using the Zebra engine at this time, but I thought that was about indexing and searching, not how the display would look.

You can see our catalog here: http://65.100.25.84:7190/ 

This catalog is pretty much the Koha defaults.  I did add some code to display the header, but all of that was done through the system preferences.  No template mods were done.

You say: 
>Messing with your frameworks isn't going to affect the display of
>search results or the detail pages. Frameworks are designed to control
>the display in the MARC editor.

What about the "Koha Link" field under the Advanced Constraints for a subfield.  My reading of this is that this is the link between the Koha DB fields and the MARC fields, but perhaps only for searching purposes not display.  I haven't changed this as it looked to me like a one to one relationship, and I didn't want to point it away from 245$a.  Anyway, that is why I thought the framework settings might be effecting this.  

Thanks for your help.

Doug




>>> Owen Leonard <oleonard at myacpl.org> 3/5/2009 8:14 PM >>>
The short answer is that there isn't any such thing as "normal view
customization." The normal view is hard-coded in the Perl script. It
pulls what data it pulls, and to change that you'd have to modify the
script that controls it.

The XSLT version is theoretically more open to customization *if*:

 - you have access to your server's filesystem
 - you understand enough about XSLT to hack the template

Messing with your frameworks isn't going to affect the display of
search results or the detail pages. Frameworks are designed to control
the display in the MARC editor.

I share your frustration with this display. In fact, the more I look
at it the more frustrated I get! Here's what I see in my OPAC
(http://acpl.kohalibrary.com):

With XSLT off, the search results screen shows 3 available and 6
checked out of one title. Clicking through to the detail screen shows
4 available and 2 checked out. I'm assuming those totals don't match
up because we have the hidelostitems system preference turned on.

  http://myacpl.org/koha/examples/opac-searchresults-xslt-off.png 

With XSLT on, the search results screen shows 3 available, 3 checked
out, and 3 lost. The detail screen still shows 4 available and 2
checked out. At least this time the number of lost items seems
accurate, but why are the available and checked out numbers wrong?

  http://myacpl.org/koha/examples/opac-searchresults-xslt-on.png 

The other differences in the displays are equally frustrating, but I
can't say for sure without more digging what differences are
limitations of the program and what are shortcomings in the template
design. For instance, I suspect the search term highlighting doesn't
appear in the XSLT version because it's not possible. But the
differences in what information displays should be addressed.

  -- Owen

-- 
Web Developer
Athens County Public Libraries
http://www.myacpl.org