Comment 4 for bug 1412218

Hi Terran,

I loaded this code on to one of our servers just to make sure I had a good handle on what it is doing. After looking at it, I would have to say it would not work well for at least one of our Evergreen sites.

It's always hard to say what a user's expectations will be. I think an argument can be made that many users might expect to search the same location during a given session, even as they change to entirely new search. However, there are other users that might choose to search one branch for one search, but expect to return to their default search library when conducing the next search. I think any system is going to get a mix of these users, and I would be hard pressed to say how the majority of users would be searching.

However, a consortium may set up a catalog in specific ways that would make this change problematic. As an example, you mentioned that the initial concern in bug 994058 was that it would reset the search to the consortium level. IIRC, that concern was voiced by Dan Scott. I don't want to speak for Dan (apparently I'm about to do so), but I know his catalog is configured so that when you go to https://laurentian.concat.ca/, the catalog is configued to automatically scope to his library's collections, adding a locg=105 to the URL. If this code is added to core Evergreen and a user who is not logged in uses his catalog, then it looks like we'll be back to the problem where the search library is being reset to the consortium, which isn't really the default for that catalog.

My concern is actually the opposite of what Dan voiced in that older discussion. We have an Evergreen site that, in its Apache config, adds locg=1 to the URL to automatically scope to the consortium. The reason is because a large percentage of their catalog searches are done from home where people are placing holds. That consortium doesn't want the default search to be the user's preferred librayr. Instead, the default search library is the consortium, and the preferred library is used as a means to float a user's library's holdings to the top of the list.

With this code, the user's search library would then be changed to their preferred library, even though the default typically is the consortium, not the preferred library.

We have other Evergreen sites that do not set the consortium as the default and may have different expectations of what should happen when the Clear button is used. This is why I was wondering if it's something that could be configurable, because I think the desired behavior here is closely tied to how an Evergreen site sets its default search.