It is possible to delete a patron record with open transactions through Merge Patrons function in patron group

[Christina McCarthy]

EG 2.5, 2.7
PG: 9.2

This was reported to occur at one of our libraries running EG version 2.5 and I was able to replicate on our training server running 2.7.

It is possible to delete a patron record with open transactions (circulations, holds, and/or bills) via the “merge patrons” button when the merge is done through the user groups screen instead of the patron search screen.

Steps to replicate:

From patron group page, select the users to be merged and through “Choose an Action” select “Merge Selected Patrons”. Choose a lead record and click “Merge”.

Unlike when merging through the patron search screen, the page does not refresh. Both the merged lead record and the now-deleted record display.

It is possible for staff to believe the records were not merged since both still display. Staff select both records again, and “Choose an Action > Merge Selected Patrons”

Staff select the deleted record as the lead record and click “Merge”.

The result is that both patron records are now flagged deleted, even if one of them had open transactions.

Normally when an action would delete a patron record with open transactions I would expect the delete to fail with the message "ACTOR_USER_DELETE_OPEN_XACTS: The user you have attempted to delete cannot be deleted because it has open circulations and/or unpaid bills".

Two possible solutions for this come to mind: The simplest would be that the screen displaying the patron groups refreshes after the merge to show only the lead record data, as the patron search screen does. This would prevent staff from selecting the same two patrons again to merge.

Alternatively, the patron merge could fail (preferably with an informative message) if Deleted = TRUE for the selected lead record.

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

Confirmed -- I can still make this happen on XUL client in 2.12.3, using the steps as described above.

However, the web client removes the "Merge Patrons" action from the Groups tab, so I'm tagging this as fixed in webby.

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

Setting this bug to Won't Fix since it is fixed in the web client and the xul client is now deprecated.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

>>However, the web client removes the "Merge Patrons" action from the Groups tab, so I'm tagging this as fixed in webby.<<

Adding link to https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1729676.

We use Merge Patrons from the Groups tab (in the xul client) on at least a weekly basis.