[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Time Zone functionality

[James Fournie]

Hi there,

I've posted a similar email on the DEV list so apologies for the cross post, if you've read that one, this is the same post but with less technical language.

I've been working on some time zone support for Evergreen to accomodate the inclusion of Manitoba SPRUCE into the Sitka family, as well as our long suffering libraries in B.C. but using Mountain Time, and the few sites who don't use daylight savings.

The main issue with due dates, is that a database trigger pushes all day-interval due dates to 23:59 in the server time.  Unfortuately, the staff client does convert this time when displayed, for example sites in Mountain time see this as 00:59.  This is very bad, as it's basically the next day, so the due date is really not very accurate for them.

In order to circumvent this, I've removed the trigger and enhanced a block of Perl code to implement a hook left behind by another developer for developing time zone functionality onto.  This allowed me to create an org unit setting for "time zone" which allows you to select from some predefined time zones.    I used an org unit setting as there isn't really any other place to get the time zone from the staff client right now, it would require much more code.

So far it works great in non-production testing.  But right now my current problem with this approach is that it doesn't adjust manually set due dates -- those are not passed through this function as they don't have a predefined "interval", so it means that a multiday loan that is set manually in the staff client, will not be pushed to 23:59.

There are numerous ways I could restore the previous functionality, however I've been thinking about this, and the previous functionality of pushing any multi-day loan to 23:59 is not intuitive and probably breaks some usability concepts.  If there is a manual due time selector, the user should expect it to actually set the time, a user wouldn't normally expect it to be pushed to 23:59 if there is a time selector -- there's nothing telling the user when it's going to be pushed to 23:59 so it's not intuitive and breaks the user's expectation.   It's a bit different than when the server calculates a due date interval from 7 days as there's no time directly associated with that interval.

My personal preference would be to enhance the staff client have a popup or some way of selecting between just a "due date" with no time option, implicit that the time will be pushed to 23:59, and then either a "due date + time" option, or just a "time" option, presuming that the item would be due the same day.  Another important feature that may be worth adding here would be some way of having a buch of presets, for example 1 hour, 3 hours, or 1 day, 3 days, etc.  I haven't done anything with this piece yet but I'd appreciate any feedback or thoughts on how it should work.

Thanks

James Fournie
BC Libraries Cooperative