Views referenced in reporter UI are not created by default

[Chris Sharp]

The following views are reference in the default /openils/conf/fm_IDL.xml file:

reporter.classic_current_circ
reporter.legacy_cat1
reporter.legacy_cat2
reporter.classic_current_billing_summary
reporter.classic_item_list
money.open_circ_balance_by_owning_lib
money.open_balance_by_owning_lib
money.open_circ_balance_by_circ_and_owning_lib
money.open_balance_by_circ_and_owning_lib
money.open_circ_balance_by_usr_home_and_owning_lib
money.open_balance_by_usr_home_and_owning_lib

but they are not created in the default install process. Thomas Berezansky and I corresponded on the Open-ILS-General list about this issue after I suggested to someone to use the "Classic Item List" view to create a template and it was not found on a Evergreen 2.0.7 implementation.

Tom's suggestion was to comment out or remove the references to the non-existent views in fm_IDL.xml. I have suggested we comment them out and include inline documentation about how to enable them.

[Chris Sharp (chrissharp123)]

I can see this comment in the fm_IDL.xml file:

"What follows is a set of example extensions that are useful for PINES. Comment out or remove if you don't want them."

So basically what I suggest is that we comment them out by default (to correspond with their non-creation) and change the comment to say:

"What follows is a set of example extensions that are useful for PINES. Uncomment them and run the example.reporter-extension.sql script available in Open-ILS/src/sql/Pg/ in the Evergreen source directory."

or something similar.

[Chris Sharp (chrissharp123)]

I just filed a duplicate of this bug without remembering this one. In any case, my proposed solution has changed. Here are my comments from the duplicate bug:

I case see cases for and against including these reporter sources by default. They provide solid, tested, and maintained sources that ease template creation for non-developer or non-system-administrator end users, but they do make some PINES specific assumptions, especially regarding the use of statistical categories. In PINES asset.stat_cat.ids 1 and 2 have special significance, as they were used to port legacy categories over from PINES' old ILS. There may be other assumptions I'm not thinking of.

In any case, however, I don't think it hurts anyone by default to have these sources fully available, but it does create confusion to have them available in the interface but not technically usable. I'm working up a branch that will install the PINES views by default, and I'll let the community decide whether or not that's a good idea ;-)

And here is that branch:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/csharp/lp1450218_make_pines_reports_extensions_available_by_default

[Ben Shum (bshum)]

Hmm, since the solution proposed here is to add the example PINES views by default for new installations, I might suggest that this is not necessarily a bug fix that's to be backported to previous versions, but a new feature that these PINES example views are now to be included by default from now on in Evergreen.next (in this case, 2.9).

The question is, should we add a note in the version-upgrade script to tell folks to go ahead and run the example view sql on their systems for consistency? Or would that be presumptuous? What about users who have already taken the example views and customized them to fit their personal needs? Asking them to run the script now would overwrite anything that they have set up locally. I only mention that possibility because I know we've done it.

For consistency, I agree that it'd be nice to include these by default for new installations, but moving forward past that point, once they are considered default views, we need to come up with a strategy for supporting them and maintaining these views from now on.

Removing pullrequest and targets pending further discussion on approaches for this bug...

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

I don't think they should be installed by default.

I do think that they should be included as examples/samples/useful reports with documentation on what they are meant to do and how to install and enable them.

I agree this should wait for 2.next at this point.