[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Adding ONIX support and Evergreen acquisitions

[Mike Rylander]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Paul Waak <ptwaak at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I need to rapidly patch Evergreen to accept ONIX product selection files
> from vendors as part of EDI. For the short term, the ONIX file will be
> translated into MARC21slim XML and processed with Vandelay. I may have to
> extend it to work with non-EDIFACT messages as well. At this point I have
> two questions.

IIUC, ONIX records are not EDI (that is, for the purposes of
Evergreen, acquisitions/purchasing messages), but equivalent to MARC
order records from a vendor.  Your current plan suggests I do, indeed,
UC.

Evergreen 2.3 just got massive feature improvements in this (ACQ order
record loading) area, as well as EDI message processing.  You might
want to look into those improvements, particularly the ACQ order
record loading improvements, before too much code is written.  You may
need nothing more than an ONIX-to-MARCXML stylesheet, and perhaps an
X12-to-EDIFACT stylesheet for EDI.

>
> Is anyone already working on this?
>

That depends on exactly what version of Evergreen you're talking
about; no new features go into existing releases, and 2.3 was just
feature-frozen on August 1, so the next release that can get new
features not already (nominally) complete is the release planned for
the spring of 2013.  There is a good bit of ACQ work planned for then,
but I'm not aware of ONIX support in particular.  Much of the recent
work may simplify yours, however.  Here's a list of much of, but
certainly not all, the recent ACQ related commits for 2.3 (now in
beta):

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=Evergreen.git&a=search&h=refs%2Fheads%2Frel_2_3&st=commit&s=ACQ

> Also, I am looking at
> Open-ILS/src/perlmods/lib/OpenILS/Application/Acq/EDI.pm and got curious. I
> would like to follow the EDI file naming conventions "FTP FILENAMING
> STANDARD – Issue 4" from EDItEUR / BISG / BIC. This would simplify a lot of
> things. Before I dive into it, though, has anyone noticed whether vendors
> actually follow this convention?
>

I doubt most ACQ suppliers do, but you'd need to confirm with them and
test.  Even then, we'd surely need to be able to accept non-standard
file names.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | Director of Research and Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com