OPAC: Barcode that starts with a letter cannot login to My Account

[Jennifer Pringle]

Evergreen 2.8 and Evergreen 2.10.2

If you have a patron barcode that starts with a letter it cannot be used to login to My Account.

This is an issue for patrons with barcodes that are prefixed with letters. ie. MPL1234 (for Maple Public Library).

I think this is related some or all of the following:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1255561
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/997098
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1528647

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

As a work-around, the opac.barcode_regex library setting could be used to identify cases where patron barcodes start with something other than a digit. E.g., if any string that starts with either a digit or with MPL is (likely) a barcode, you could use something like "^(\d|MPL)" as the regex.

This isn't perfect, however -- if there are other patrons not belonging to MPL who nonetheless have usernames starting with "MPL", they would not be able to log in using their username.

[Beth Longwell (blongwel)]

I'm seeing this in 3.1.7.

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

There is a hard coded value of '^\d' used in the absence of the opac.barcode_regex setting. You should use the setting. However, the hard coded regular expression could be changed to allow anything as a barcode.

I'm not sure what restricting it to requiring something that begins with a number buys anyone.

Does anyone know why the code is as it is?

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

OK. So, I can answer my own question after spending < 5 minutes looking at it. The code in EGCatLoader.pm needs some way to differentiate a barcode from a user name because either can be used to login.

I think the solution to this is to set the opac.barcode_regex setting as appropriate for you your local conditions.

[[e-mail] (tji)]

We have various formats of barcode and usrname. Probably the solution is using separate boxes for usrname and barcode on the interface.

[Michele Morgan (mmorgan)]

Just noting this is still an issue in the 3.11 Bootstrap OPAC.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

I'm not seeing this problem either in our 3.12 production site or in current main with Concerto data (both using Bootstrap OPAC), but I'm not sure if something has changed or if it's a configuration difference. (Note that opac.barcode_regex is null on both of these servers.)