[Koha] 2 different circulation rules against a patron

[Paul Hoffman]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 06:34:54PM -0500, Chee Hong wrote:
> Thanks for your reply and explanation. I agree with you that it will be a
> maintenance nightmare for the upgrade. Personally, I think this is a nice
> to have feature. In order to realize my use case, I need to create 2 patron
> accounts for users who need to have this special privilege.

Unless I'm misunderstanding or have forgotten what you wrote in your 
original post, what you're looking for is a way to enable an interaction 
such as this...

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maria (a graduate student who also works as an adjunct faculty member) 
brings a book to the circulation desk and asks to check it out.

Bob (a circ staff member) scans Maria's barcode, or searches using her 
name.

Koha indicates that there are two options to choose from when performing 
the checkout:

    (1) Check it out to Maria as a graduate student.
    (2) Check it out to Maria as an adjunct faculty member.

Bob selects the desired option.

(Alternatively, Koha sees that #2 would result in a longer loan period 
and selects that option automatically.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Furthermore, you would prefer to do this without the added burden of 
having two separate patron records (i.e., two different rows in the 
"borrowers" table) in Koha.

Am I understanding correctly?

If so, it might be useful to think of this at a higher level of 
abstraction.  Here are my ideas...

We keep the two separate records -- each must continue to have a unique 
cardnumber, which may make this idea unusable -- but link them in some 
way.  

Maria is a person with two roles at your institution.  We create a new 
"object" -- a Person -- and reference Maria (the Person) from each 
patron record.

In concrete terms, this might mean:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE persons (
    personnumber INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    preferred_borrowernumber INTEGER REFERENCES borrowers(borrowernumber);
);
ALTER TABLE borrowers
ADD COLUMN personnumber INTEGER REFERENCES persons(personnumber);
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then (*handwave*) we add an interface for linking borrowers, another for 
selecting the desired borrower from a list of linked borrowers, etc.

It's just a thought...

Paul.

-- 
Paul Hoffman <paul at flo.org>
Software Manager
Fenway Library Organization
550 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
617-989-5032