[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Asynchronous checkins

[Jason Etheridge]

> I was wondering if somebody could tell me what the purpose is of the Fast Entry (Asynchronous) check in option. My understanding is that it allows
> staff to quickly check in items without waiting for a response from the server for each checkin.

Kathy, that was the idea.  Sadly, it was an experiment I had put into
master before I got into the habit of using topic branches with git,
and it slipped into production releases.  It's been there ever since.

> If it's used, does the system suppress transit slips and alerts?

You get the same behavior and responses that you do with normal
check-in; the only change should be that the textbox in the interface
gives you an opportunity to scan another barcode possibly before the
response for the first barcode is received.

So you may get slip and print dialogs (and network failure dialogs)
for items that were scanned prior to the most recent one, and the
order of responses isn't guaranteed.  But every scanned item should be
creating a row in the list, regardless of what happens, and the
results of the checkin (success or not) should be indicated.  If it's
not in the list (say you scanned something before the textbox had
"focus" again), then the server didn't get get a request for it.  I've
also heard of fast scanning putting two or more barcodes together
without a linefeed between them.  I'm not sure if that's a client
problem or a scanner problem.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
| Support Manager
| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
| phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: jason at esilibrary.com
| web: http://www.esilibrary.com