[Koha] inconsistencies in acquisition.simple process

[Chris Cormack]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 03:33:34PM +0200, Pierre Cauchois said:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working on fitting the acquisition.simple process to the needs of the ESIEE library, and something is bugging me on the addbiblio.pl page. Why do pieces of information like place, number of pages or itemtype should appear here, on the bibliographic notice form, and not on the item form (the next page)? Because of that, we are obliged to create two different notices for the same bibliography if we want two items to be in different places. Worse, the fields concerning place and itemtype duplicate themselves strangely when a bibliography has several items.
> 
> Can someone explain me the technical reasons of this "inconsistency", if it's one?
> 
Hi Pierre

Ok, basically I think it boils down to a badly designed forms :)
As you probably know, koha stores bibliographical item in 3 separate tables.
Biblio, biblioitems and items.

biblio has things like title, author, copyright date etc.
biblioitems has number of pages, itemtype, call number etc
items has accession date, location (which branch etc)

So the potential is you should have 1 biblio, 1 or many biblioitems, and 1
or many items.

Lets take The Fellowship of the ring.
We might have 2 copies of the DVD 3 of the book, and 1 large print version
say.

So we would have 1 biblio.
3 biblioitems ( 1 for dvd, 1 for fiction, 1 for large print)
and 6 items
(2 attached to the dvd biblioitem, 3 attached to the fiction and 1 to the
large print)

So thats how the internal storage works.

Of course we can make it appear to the librarian or the borrower as if we
have 1 biblio, and 6 items ie abstract over the biblioitems. 
But I think the form has been designed in a way so that it looks like we'd
need 3 biblios for the above example .. which is not right. As soon as I get
a chance ill take a look at redesigning the form.

Chris


-- 
Chris Cormack                                                     Programmer
027 4500 789                                       Katipo Communications Ltd
chris at katipo.co.nz                                          www.katipo.co.nz