[Koha] Can't do automatic renewal

[Raymund Delahunty]

I'd urge caution for anyone planning to use auto-renewal functionality if they are not on (at least) the 21.05 version. We have been trying to get auto-renewals working satisfactorily since moving to Koha in 2015 but two major bugs prevented us from simply turning the functionality on, and we have developed a workaround. The two bugs are: Bug 19014 - Patrons should not get an 'on_reserve' notification if the due date is far into the future (fixed in 20.05), and Bug 18532 - Messaging preferences for auto renewals (fixed in 21.05). We will remain on 20.11.06 until July next year but we had our support company try to backport the fix for 18532 into our test server at 20.11.06 and last week I tried to assess if I could safely remove our workaround. Astonishingly the auto-renewal job was taking hours to run and I noticed every user with items on loan was set to receive an email listing every item on loan. Spamming was bad enough with 19014 and 16532 so I have given up testing the backporting. We will not think about using Koha auto-renewal functionality (without the workaround) until we move to 21.11 in July next year. (I think in my testing I stumbled across bug 29381 - Auto-renewal digest messages are sent on every cron run).

The auto-renewal workaround avoids the problems listed in both 19014 and 18532 (and as we are not using AUTO_RENEWALS_DGST, 29381 is not an issue). And the workaround allows us to use auto-renewals satisfactorily in Koha 20.11 (and also when we were on 18.11, and I think even an older Koha version). It involves turning off the AUTO_RENEWALS email, in favour of using RENEWAL as confirmation that items have successfully renewed and using ODUE1 as notification that auto-renewal has failed. (We had to turn on CHECKIN and CHECKOUT to get RENEWAL to go out, but that was OK really). One of the things I like about splitting the success and failure emails is that the email title can include 'NO ACTION REQUIRED' when items have renewed OK. Maybe when we move to using the AUTO_RENEWAL_DGST we can use template toolkit code to set the email title to give this nice reassurance that no action is needed when everything renews OK.

Ray Delahunty
University of the Arts London

-----Original Message-----
From: Koha <koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz> On Behalf Of Toni Afandi
Sent: 05 November 2021 02:47
To: koha <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
Subject: [Koha] Can't do automatic renewal

Dear all,

We still have not recovered from the occurrence  of  automatic renewal bugs. When a patron checks out she/he can't be set to do automatic renewal.  We already updated the Koha version to 20.11.11.000. What else must we do?

Thank you in advance.

*Toni Afandi*
*Librarian*
*STT SAAT*
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