[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Library Shortname

[Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley]

Hi Kermit,

Everything Rogan says is 100% correct, but if it's a matter of
communicating with library staff who may not know what you mean
(although this would kind of surprise me) when you ask for their
branch's shortname, there is an easy way to retrieve an Evergreen
site's whole organizational tree, with names and shortnames and the
basic contact information.

Just make an HTTP request against any Evergreen server like so:

http://demo.evergreencatalog.com/gateway?service=open-ils.actor&method=open-ils.actor.org_tree.retrieve

That is, you substitute the hostname of the site you're working with
for "demo.evergreencatalog.com".

The data returned is almost* JSON, and you'll quickly figure out the
structure and which array elements per-org unit contain names and
shortnames.

* It contains comments, and JSON doesn't technically allow comments,
but some parsers can be configured to overlook this.  This data is
really meant to be fed into something called Fieldmapper, a component
of Evergreen for autovivifying objects with accessor methods in
various languages, but you can treat it as JSON if you know or can
figure out what you're looking for.

Hope this helps

Lebbeous

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Rogan Hamby <rogan.hamby at yclibrary.net> wrote:
> This question seems so straight forward I feel like I'm missing something
> but at the risk of looking a fool I'll respond.  Library short names are
> static.  They're actually held in the actor.org_unit table though usually
> libraries will know what their short names are as well since they show up a
> lot (holds reports, routing slips, etc...).  Since they're not dynamic just
> asking the libraries or getting a copy from the db table will let you know.
> They can be changed but it's not done very often unless a library system
> discovered they really painted themselves into a corner with some choice
> they made.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Kermit Krug <Kermit.Krug at quality-books.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I work in the IT department for Quality Books Inc, a small press book
>> vendor for public and school libraries.  We sell to a considerable number of
>> libraries that use Evergreen, and we try to utilize Evergreen’s SRU facility
>> with an ISBN search to avoid selling titles to the library that they already
>> hold.  The SRU URL syntax requires the shortname of the library.  Is there
>> any surefire way to determine the library shortnames for the individual
>> libraries in a consortium?
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks!
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA
> Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services,
> York County Library System
>
> “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit
> me.”
> ― C.S. Lewis



-- 
Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley
 | Software Developer
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
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 | email:  lebbeous at esilibrary.com
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