Auto-deletion of bibs does not check active/pending Acq orders

[Tiffany Little]

Followup from this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1634244

Rogan's fix prevents an intentional deletion of a bib that is empty when it's attached to an open lineitem. It works great.

However, it looks like if the library setting Retain Empty Bib Records is either unset or set to FALSE, the bibs are still deleted even if they are attached to an open lineitem.

I would expect that if all items on the bib are either transferred off or deleted, that the bib should just remain active/undeleted. Then if someone tried to definitively delete it, they would be notified by Rogan's fix that the bib is attached to an open lineitem.

[Tiffany Little (tslittle)]

I was thinking about this this morning, and with the workflow I've suggested above, I see an issue.

The intention of the Retain Empty Bib Records setting is so that we have on-the-spot bib cleanup of empty bibs, without needing to always do manual cleanup. So if we blocked that auto-deletion because there's a pending lineitem attached to the bib, that means if the Acq user *didn't* activate that purchase order for whatever reason--or even if they later completely delete that lineitem--that the bib would remain just empty and undeleted. So we *would* need to be doing some sort of cleanup (whether manual or via script) to find these empty bibs.

What if instead, the Acq copies creation did a check if the bib is deleted, and if the bib is deleted, undeletes the bib and *then* creates the copies? That way we still get the benefit of the auto-deletion of bibs from the Retain Empty Bib Records setting, but we also don't have empty bibs hanging out in the catalog that may/may not be tied to lineitems at any given time.

Thoughts?

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

+1 to Tiffany's suggestion of the acq copies creation doing a check and undeleting bibs as needed.