[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Feature Proposal: Enhancements to Patron Statistical Categories

[Scott Prater]

I've created a proposal on the wiki to enhance Patron Statistical Categories:

http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:proposal:patron_statistical_categories

And a corresponding blueprint:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/evergreen/+spec/enhanced-patron-stistical-categories

In summary, these enhancements are as follows:

    * Allow administrators to set Patron Statistical Categories as
required fields;
    * Allow administrators to set a flag that prevents users from
entering free text in a Patron Statistical Category;
    * Allow administrators to set a default entry from the list of
fixed entries available in the Patron Statistical Category

Basically, the purpose of these enhancements is to improve the quality
of data entered in the categories.  Reports generated from this data
may be used to inform funding decisions, so there's a great deal of
interest in making sure that the data is both comprehensive and
consistent.

I'm working with Bibliomation to implement these changes; our hope is
to have something working and ready to roll into the codebase by the
end of the calendar year.  I'm new to Evergreen and the Evergreen
development community, and would appreciate any comments, pointers,
criticisms, etc. more experienced developers may have.  In particular,
I understand that changes to the database schema are adopted very
cautiously.  These enhancements entail the addition of three new
fields to the table actor.stat_cat  -- if anyone has any questions
about those additions, or sees some potential problems with adding the
new fields, I'd love to discuss it.

thanks!

-- Scott