Sometimes it's impossible to know ahead of time when a branch may need to be closed, and backdating or amnesty mode may not work well in some situations. For those situations where forcibly adjusting due dates and fines, as well as potentially alerting patrons to the changes, is required, we offer the Emergency Closing Handler. From the commit message on the forthcoming branch:
Staff are provided with interfaces and mechanisms to create library closings that, in addition to affecting future circulation and booking due dates, and hold shelf expirations, will automatically move existing circulation and booking due dates and hold shelf expiration times. This new functionality is conceptually described as Emergency Closings and business logic implementing it as the Emergency Closing Handler. It contains additions and adjustments to the user interface, business logic, and database layers. Access to this functionality is available through the Closed Dates Editor interface in the staff client which has been ported to AngularJS.
Overview
This development has created new business logic code to inspect, in real time, existing circulation, booking, and hold records, and modify such date and time stamps so that the circulation, booking, or hold will end in the same state it would have if the closing had existed at the time the circulation or booking occurred, or the hold was placed and captured. Of specific note, hourly loans will have their due date adjusted to be the end of the day following the closing.
When the Emergency Closing is saved, any fines accrued during the closing may be voided, as settings dictate, with the exception of circulations that have been marked as LOST or LONG OVERDUE. That is, even for LOST and LONG OVERDUE circulations with due dates that fall within the Emergency Closing, no fine adjustment will be applied. Emergency Closing processing is permanent, and cannot be rolled back.
This functionality is explicitly initiated by staff action. If staff do not request an Emergency Closing, existing circulations, bookings, and holds will not be processed and adjusted. However, if staff request any Closing that starts nearer in time than the length of the longest circulation duration configured for use in the Evergreen instance they will be prompted with the option to create the closing as an Emergency Closing.
Action/Trigger hooks have been created for circulations and bookings that are adjusted by the Emergency Closing Handler. These will facilitate the creation of notifications to patrons that the due date has changed and to alert them to potential changes in accrued fines.
Booking start dates are explicitly ignored in this implementation. Because an Emergency Closing is, by its nature, an unexpected event, it will be up to staff to address any bookings which intersect with a new Emergency Closings. Reports can be used to identify booking start dates that overlap with a closing and that may require staff intervention.
Staff requsting and Emergency Closing must have the new EMERGENCY_CLOSING permission.
Here's the branch!
http://