[OPEN-ILS-DEV] A Print Notice action/trigger reactor (instead of Email Notice) for Evergreen

[Thomas Berezansky]

For holds we already have the validators that check if a patron has  
"email" turned on for the hold when told to. That doesn't help with  
some of your other issues, but I will get there in a minute.

If SendEmail doesn't find a "To" then it fails to send the message.  
However, there is no guarantee that the message is to the *patron*. It  
could be a hardcoded address to send to somewhere else. Staff may be  
getting messages for tracking purposes, for example. A cancelled hold  
could be alerting staff as well as the patron, that kind of thing. So  
baking any of that into SendEmail is a bad idea.

Generally for this kind of thing you don't want to touch the reactor  
(though teaching SendEmail to look for a "To" and fail more gracefully  
or something wouldn't be bad) but instead create a validator, or add  
new functionality to an existing validator. This is what we did for  
some hold notification items.

For other potential notices you can assign user preferences for on/off  
per user. MVLC has done this for pre-due and overdue email notices,  
for example. Otherwise there isn't much that I know of for "patron has  
an email address on file".

Functionality-wise, a "fail if the patron has no email address on  
file" flag for some of the validators may be good, as well as a  
"patron needs to *not* have this preference set" option to complement  
the "patron *has* this preference set" (allowing a preference to be a  
toggle). Implementation of these still needs some thought, though.

Thomas Berezansky
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium


Quoting "Mai, Hieu Trung" <hieu.mai at mnsu.edu>:

> Hi all,
> This is Simon. I started at PALS on July 18 (http://www.mnpals.org).  
> I?m working with Evergreen now. I guess I am very new with this  
> Evergreen product. So I need your help or some ideas that help me a  
> lot.
> Now I am trying to build a new action/trigger reactor to generate  
> print notices in Evergreen. I also need a way, perhaps by modifying  
> SendEmail, to generate email notices only for patrons with an actual  
> email address and who have their communication preference set to  
> email. Patrons who do not want to get email or who do not have email  
> addresses should have print notices generated for them.
> I made some of them work. Normally I can generate print notices,  
> instead of email notice now. But I got stuck in finding out how to  
> know who (patron) have their communication preference set to email  
> or not. While researching some Evergreen documents, I found  
> Fieldmapper IDL that maps database fields to Evergreen objects. I?m  
> wondering if I need to add a new class to fm_IDL.xml to get the  
> preference of patron set to email or not (Because I don?t find it  
> there ? We?re using Evergreen 2.2 for development).
> Anyone used to work with this before? Do you have any ideas to know  
> who (patron) have their communication preference set to email or not  
> (work with reactor)?
> Thank you.
> Regards,
> Simon.
>
> ==========? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ==========
> Hieu Mai (Simon)
> Systems Developer - PALS
> A Program of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
> Email: hieu.mai at mnsu.edu<mailto:hieu.mai at mnsu.edu>  
> (master.simon21 at yahoo.com<mailto:master.simon21 at yahoo.com>)
>  "Every day may not be good? but there?s something good in every day"
>
>