[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Simple self check

[Ben Shum]

Hi Michele,

We were literally working on setting up a new system for web selfcheck for
one of our libraries yesterday.  We've been using a combination of
different operating systems (sometimes Windows, yesterday Lubuntu for the
first time due to RAM limitations on the machine) and a dedicated browser
like OpenKiosk (http://openkiosk.mozdevgroup.com/) that's locked down to
just the web selfcheck.  This was our fourth or so library that we're
slowly prototype testing with among our consortium members presently as we
work to establish general procedures for deployment.

What I found was that you are correct that printing was often quite fickle.
 Our major issue yesterday was discovering that we had incorrectly
configured our OpenKiosk browser to disable tabbed browsing and weren't
allowing any popups to open.  This led to a hanging print action that would
just put up a progress bar with no finish until the timeout because the
background javascript was waiting for a print that never occurred.
 Basically, the way the page is built required me to allow popups from the
site in order to print consistently.  The popup page seems to be grabbing
content that's generated on the server side using database action/trigger
templates to collect and build a page with the content to be printed.  Once
that page is printed, the popup goes away, and that in turn takes away the
print progress bar that's waiting on the initial selfcheck window area.
 Additionally in our case, without tabbed browsing, the popup actually took
the place of the selfcheck page with no return back to the selfcheck,
leaving only the templated page contents that were meant to be print on the
screen with no back button; hence the need for tabbed browsing.

This was the case with our experiences with OpenKiosk so far.  Firefox did
spit out some quick warnings about popup blocking, which is what caused me
to start reading into the source javascript on the page and learning how
printing operated.

Overall, I'm not entirely sure I like how the javascript operates on these
selfcheck pages, though I do not have too much time to commit towards
reviewing or writing new solutions at this time.  It might be an
interesting question for future development interests though.

-- Ben




On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Michele Morgan <mmorgan at noblenet.org>
wrote:

> We are wondering how many libraries are using the simple self check web
> interface built into Evergreen as documented here:
>
> http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.5/_self_checkout.html
>
> One of the problems we are having is printing receipts reliably. In
> Firefox, receipts print sometimes, but other times they do not print and
> leave a progress bar hanging on the screen.
>
> We have also experimented with running self check in NetKiosk, but have
> not been able to print receipts at all there.
>
> What sort of experiences have others had using the Simple Self Check?
>
> Any advice or recommendations for getting receipts to print reliably is
> welcome.
>
> --
> Michele Morgan, Technical Assistant
> North of Boston Library Exchange, Danvers Massachusetts
> mmorgan at noblenet.org
>



-- 
Benjamin Shum
Evergreen Systems Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
24 Wooster Ave.
Waterbury, CT 06708
203-577-4070, ext. 113
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