[Koha] Notes on Self Checkout

[Aparrish]

Hello all,

Offering some hopefully constructive criticism of the self-checkout module
et cetera. 

Details: 
I've just finished upgrading to Koha 3.22.04, with Perl 5.02. 

The following are enabled: 
AllowSelfCheckReturns 	
AutoSelfCheckAllowed
AutoSelfCheckID
AutoSelfCheckPass (with the info of a staff user who had first circulate,
and later superlibrarian permissions)
WebBasedSelfCheck 

1. First off, the information in the Koha manual in section 5.12 has been
unchanged since version 3.8. I believe the code snippet that's meant to be
pasted into IntranetUserJS is incorrectly formatted. I can't get it to work,
after having removed the line breaks and fiddling with various things. To
access the SCO, therefore, I've used a plain HTML hyperlink which is
inserted in "opacheader". This works fine. 

2. It turns out that users must be assigned a card number in order to use
either the barcode OR the username/password logins to the SCO. This was
probably a dumb error on my part, but it's not a totally obvious dependency
either as far as the u/p login is concerned. 

Anyway, after that the SCO allows a patron with no permissions to log in,
either with barcode or with u/p, and check out books by barcode. The SCO
correctly displays a blue message with the right username. 

3. In 3.22 the bug where one would return to opac-main logged in as the
checkout staff user has been fixed; however it now redirects to a log-in
screen rather than the catalog main page, which I don't really like. I'll
toy with this. The most seamless Apple Inc. solution would be to return
someone to the main screen still logged into their patron account, but
perhaps the recent SCO bugfixes have ruled this out. 

4. In the SCO files by default the "koha" header in the top left corner is
pointed to /opac/sco/sco-main.pl. This is useless. I fix this by editing
/usr/share/koha/opac/htdocs/opac-tmpl/bootstrap/en/includes/masthead-sco.inc,
and replacing the link in line 7 with /cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl so that
someone can click "Koha" to escape the SCO. This seems much more intuitive
to me. (Adding a "home" link would serve the same purpose, but this is
easier.)

5. Very ambitious - I would really like the capacity to dump the contents of
the cart into the self-checkout so that it is a one-click process (barring
the login), but I think I lack the programming knowledge for this. Some sort
of simple script which saved the contents of the cart and then injected
barcodes one by one into the self-checkout, automatically, is what I'm
envisioning. Most of the parts required seem to be already there. I will
experiment and probably open this as its own question at some later point.
Any pro bono contribution to this would be very much appreciated. 

At this point the only actual PROBLEM is that SCO users are unable to return
books through the SCO. I click the return button on an active checkout and
nothing happens - the page reloads and the item is still checked-out. It
seems like all the right preferences are on. If I figure this out I'll post;
if anyone else has resolved please let me know. 

Thanks,
Andrew



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