[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] SIP2 Enhancements

[Jason Stephenson]

Hi, all.

I sent this message to the dev list yesterday and thought that I  
should also share it with the general list.

I have been working on two branches of enhancements for SIP2 in  
Evergreen, and they are ready for general testing.

The first of these two branches adds support for the fee paid message  
response pair (message 37 and response 38). We are actually using an  
earlier commit of this code in production on our SIP server and will  
begin using the most recent revisions with our update this weekend. I  
am that confident that this code is ready to go.

If you 'd like to test it, I've put the relevant details in a Launchpad bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/803121

The second enhancement supports what 3M calls "chargeable loans," i.e.  
charging a fee at checkout. The Evergreen staff client and self check  
module already support this, but not SIP2. This branch attempts to add  
support for this checkout mode to SIP2 in Evergreen.

This branch has received less testing, and has not yet been tested on  
an actual self check system. We will not likely get to testing this  
until sometime next week with an actual self check.

The relevant details of this branch, if you'd like to test, are in  
this Launchpad bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/806131


Of the two branches, the fee payment branch is likely the easier to  
test. It requires only a recent version of the SIPServer software. The  
most recent revision of the master branch at  
git://git.evergreen-ils.org/SIPServer.git should do.

You can then merge or cherry-pick the SIP23738 branch into a checkout  
of the Evergreen master branch. If you want to try it on rel_2_0 or  
rel_2_1 instead of master, the branch does cherry-pick cleanly into  
the HEAD of either  origin branch. Alternatively, you can just  
checkout the SIP23738 branch and build from that, but you'll then be  
missing the most recent additions in master.

The chargeable loans branch requires that you install a special branch  
of the SIPServer code as mentioned in the Launchpad bug. This is  
because the SIPServer code required some changes to fully support the  
chargeable loans workflow as outlined by 3M.

Additionally, the chargeable loans branch depends on recent commits to  
Evergreen master, so it will likely not apply to rel_2_0 or rel_2_1  
unless you also cherry-pick the other necessary commits. If there is  
much demand, and if it looks like there is a chance of the code then  
being included in rel_2_1, I'll make a backport branch of the  
chargeable loans code.

Anyway, I just thought that I'd share the above with the community  
since I know many of you anticipate getting these features. I would  
also like for this code to get some more wide spread testing before it  
is adopted into the mainline Evergreen codebase.

Cheers,
Jason Stephenson
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium