Support targeting and fulfillment of precat copy holds (for ILL)

[Bill Erickson]

Evergreen Next

Precat copies are a handy way to represent temporary items borrowed from an external lender (e.g. ILL partner). Today, though, Evergreen fails (unintentionally) to target holds on precat copies and it avoids (intentionally) fulfilling holds on precat copies during checkout. Removing these limitations on precat copy holds would make integration of FulfILLment, NCIP, and other ILL mediators that much easier.

It's already possible to create holds on precat copies via the API. The code to do the rest is minor and has been used to good effect with Evergreen servers patched to work with FulfILLment. Branch coming soon.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Code pushed to:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/berick/lp1308239-precat-copy-holds

[Ben Shum (bshum)]

Seems logical, pushed to master for 2.7.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Just found a bug with this code which prevents precat checkouts when there is no hold. Yikes. Patch en route.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Here's the error:

Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/share/perl/5.14.2/OpenILS/Application/Circ/Circulate.pm line 1795.

It's attempting to dereference a nonexistent $self->volume object. Patch pushed:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/berick/lplp1308239-precat-copy-holds-fix

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

Verified the checkout failure with the original code, then applied the branch in comment #4, and verified that checkouts work again.

Pushed the fix branch to master.

Thanks, Bill!

[Katie Foster (kfoster)]

A nice ILL process would be.

Check out pre-cat item to ILL card (make the pre-cat record).
Go to Item Status and request item with copy hold for the requesting patron.
Check in item from ILL card.
Item is routed to patron with copy hold.
--the process works up until this point--
Then when you go to check out the (pre-cat) hold for the patron it asks you to pre-cat the item again. Even though on their holds list it shows the pre-cat information before.

It would be nice to be able to use the original pre-cat information to have continuous circ on a pre-cat item.

This takes away the liability issue of checking out an item to a patron before they actually leave the building with it and the system would notify them of the hold rather than relying on an email from a staff member which is often an email address they are not used to looking for.

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

Hi Katie - thanks for your thoughts. Since this is an closed bug, your suggestion might attract more attention if you filed it as a new "wishlist" bug report.