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

[Scott Prater]

I've completed the work on the patron statistical category
enhancements, my tests have passed, and I'm ready for the code to be
reviewed and hopefully included in a future release of Evergreen.

I created a Launchpad pullrequest bug ticket with all the details:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/960900

The new code is available in a branch I've created off of a forked
copy of Evergreen on github:

https://github.com/sprater/Evergreen/tree/patstatcat

or a more useful view of just my changes:

https://github.com/sprater/Evergreen/compare/patstatcat

thanks,

-- Scott

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Scott Prater <sprater at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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