[Koha] Koha VS Home-grown software/database

[Chris Cormack]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:45:16PM -0400, Bill Benedetto said:
> Good day.
> 
G'day

> So, here's my question, finally.....
> 
> Is it possible for me to take my data and map it to the Koha
> layout?  That is, if I start with a mysqldump of my data, can I
> use Perl to mangle it into a mysqldump of data suitable for
> importing into Koha?
> 
Certainly is, Ive spent a lot of time doing things just like this.
I think ive done about 6 or 7 conversions now, from other library systems to
Koha. And im about to start another one next week.

> Yeah, yeah.  I know.  *ANYTHING'S* possible.  But could someone
> possibly provide me with enough guidance (or documentation) so
> that I could do the job?
> 

I'll certainly try.

Luckily Koha has a set of functions we can use. So basically, what I would
do, is not do a dump, but set up a koha install running, leave your database
running. And write a script to select the data from your db, and then munge
it a bit, and call some of the Koha functions to put it into its database.

> Here's my table layout:
> 
>   CREATE TABLE catalog (
>     bookidnum smallint(6) NOT NULL auto_increment,
>     title varchar(75) NOT NULL default '',
>     author varchar(30) NOT NULL default '',
>     keywords varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
>     numcopies tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '1',
>     callnumber varchar(10) NOT NULL default '',
>     hard_paperback char(1) NOT NULL default 'H',
>     section varchar(30) NOT NULL default '',
>     PRIMARY KEY  (bookidnum),
>     UNIQUE KEY bookidnum (bookidnum)
>   ) TYPE=MyISAM;
> 
> Notes:
> 
>  o The bookidnum has nothing to do with the physical book.  It's
>    just basically the record number in the DB.
> 
So its just the unique identifier?

>  o keywords consists of a string that looks something like "cats
>    christmas" or "mississippi" or "berenstain bears" or
>    "dinosaurs holidays".  We would really like to keep these
>    keywords because that's one of the ways that the
>    librarian/user can search for books.
> 
No worries, we can put this in the notes field, thats search by a keyword
search on Koha.

>  o numcopies is misnamed and is actually the copy number.  The
>    first book is copy #1.  The second is copy #2.  And so on.
> 
Ahh righto, so if you have 3 copies of a book, ull have 3 rows in your
database?

>  o hard_paperback is just "H" or "P".
> 
Sweet, that can map to Itemtype

>  o section looks like one of these:
>      Fiction
>      Easy Fiction
>      Intermediate Fiction
>      Non-Fiction
>      Easy Non-Fiction
>      Intermediate Non-Fiction
>      Biography
>      Easy Holidays
>      YA
>      Caldecott
>      Newbery
> 
We can stick this in class

> I realize that I'm asking a lot here.  What I'm really looking
> for is some kind of one-to-one mapping that says something like
> this:
> 
>   "Your 'bookidnum' field is really field 'bookno' in table 'booktable'"
> 
> so that I might be able to mangle the data from my output to a
> new input for Koha (rather than have to re-enter all of this
> data).  FWIW, we have around 6000 books in this DB.
> 
Yep makes sense.

Bookidnum would map to itemnumber in the item table it sounds like. But what
we dont want to do is just run some inserts. If we use the Koha functions,
it builds up the MARC data for us at the same time (neat eh, .. thanks to
Paul and the other programmers who worked on the MARC stuff)

Heres a snippet of perl, showing how id perhaps do it.
Feel free to email me back offlist, or on the koha-devel list and we can get
into the nitty gritty. But here it is

#!/usr/bin/perl

use C4::Context;
use C4::Biblio;
use DBI;
use strict;

# get us a connection to the old db.
my $dbh=DBI->connect("DBI:$db_driver:$db_name:$db_host",$db_user, $db_passwd);

my $query="SELECT * FROM catalog ORDER BY title";
my $sth=$dbh->prepare($query);
$sth->execute();
my $title='';
my $biblionumber;
while (my $data=$sth->fetchrow_hashref()){
  if ($title ne $data->{'title'}){
    #its a new book
    $title=$data->{'title'};
    my $biblio= {
      title  => $title,
      author => $data->{'author'},
      notes  => $data->{'keywords'},
    };
    $biblionumber=newbiblio($biblio);
  }
  my $biblioitem ={
    biblionumber   => $biblionumber,
    itemtype       => $data->{'hard_paperback'},
    classification => $data->{'section'},
    dewey          => $data->{'callnumber'},
  }
  $biblioitemnumber = newbiblioitem($biblioitem);
  my $item = {
    biblioitemnumber => $biblioitemnumber,
    biblionumber     => $biblionumber,
  }    
  my $barcode = $data->{'bookidnum'};    
  newitems($item,($barcode));
}

In theory, that should make a biblio for each title, and a biblioitem and
item for each copy.

I havent tried it, but barring typo's, it oughta work.

Hope this is some help

Chris

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