[Koha] Idea: Basing Cart off Items instead of Biblios

[Ian Walls]

You can still have items of different item types attached to a single
biblio; that's no problem.  And you could still have patrons add the biblios
to their Carts, for tagging, putting on Lists or placing Biblio-level holds
(amongst many others).  This should work just fine.

If this does break your use-case, though, you can disable the Cart for
patrons by turning off opacbasket in the system preferences area.


-Ian

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 1:06 AM, <hansbkk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/3/10 Robin Sheat <robin at catalyst.net.nz>:
> >> Or, maybe having two separate Carts, Biblios and Items, would be the
> >> way to go, though that seems to be overcomplicating things.
> >
> > Presumably an option so that a cart can contain both items and biblios
> > would be a good middle-ground. A little more complex to deal with
> > programmatically, but if written properly it shouldn't be too bad. It
> > would also be easy to have a syspref that lets this be items
> > only/biblios only/both, as it would just have to change a bit of OPAC
> > UI.
>
> Wow, the fact that carts are biblio-level is news to me, and actually
> throws a bit of a spanner in the works for my plans for using
> item-level item-types.
>
> I was really hoping to take advantage of the fact that I could have
> different types of items associated with a single biblio record. But
> it seems if I go this route, then I should disable Carts for patrons?
> Is that even an option?
>
> To review my situation with an example:
>
> > My current use case is that I have multiple media types for a single
> film. It's all exactly the same video, not a different edition, but one
> might be a disc that's playable on a consumer player (Disc-Video), another
> may contain computer files (Disc-Data), another combines both (Disc-Mixed),
> some of our VHS tapes haven't been converted yet, and some really old home
> movies are even on 35mm!
>
> If I catalog these as separate biblios, this will creates multiple
> identical copies of the biblio-level MARC data, and just different
> ("holdings level") data in the items table, including item type. So
> when a patron searches for "2009 Proms Gala" they will get four
> identical but separate results.
>
> Also, I'm planning on using user tagging, virtual shelves, etc. which
> if I use duplicated biblio-level item-types will somehow need to be
> synchronized between duplicate biblio records - yech!
>
> Any advice would be appreciated
>



-- 
Ian Walls
Lead Development Specialist
ByWater Solutions
Phone # (888) 900-8944
http://bywatersolutions.com
ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com
Twitter: @sekjal
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