[Koha] New Calendar (17015)

[Philippe Blouin]

Good morning, afternoon, evening, night, Koha

Last summer, I brought the issue of the calendar recoding that had been 
in limbo for a long time, blocking our tentative features like opening 
hours and fines by minutes.

Also among my pet peeves was the fact that calendar calculation where 
nonapologetically very very (very) slow, slowing the script fines.pl but 
mostly the simple checkin/checkouts.

So Mehdi coded a whole new Calendar 
(https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=17015). It 
includes

  *   A new db table storing everyday in the past and future as needed
    with their respective opening hours.
      o Perfect calculation for hourly loans
      o Perfect setup for OPAC display of opening hours
  * A new intuitive UI
      o The patches do not remove the old code.  It stays in parallel
        for comparison right now.
  * A patch replacing all usage of the old calendar by the new one.
  * A full test suite, replicating all the tests in the previous suite
  * An speed improvement of 7x for fines.pl
  * A *_speed improvement of 5-10x_* for checkin with late fees
    (depending on elapsed time since due date)
      o Yeah, 4 minutes for 1000 late returns instead of 21 minutes.

We know this tool is a huge improvement on the previous code.  It also 
opens a lot more development possibilities for the imagitive Koha 
developpers.

We'll be pushing for it, and I hope it'll get support.  We'll fix and 
improve.

Oh, and _*to the testers*_ out there: it's a fun feature.  Much more fun 
to test than some architectural stuff.  :) So please come and try it!!


Philippe Blouin,
Responsable du développement informatique

Tél.  : (888) 604-2627
philippe.blouin at inLibro.com <mailto:philippe.blouin at inLibro.com>

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