Release notes

The Invoice UI is now composed of two tabs, the main invoice tab and a new Search tab. The search tab consists of a subset of the Acquisitions unified search interface. The goal is to allow users to search for lineitems to invoice. Search results may be added directly to the growing invoice. A number of small usability features are included.

The same setup that is required today for retrieving and reacting to EDI Order Response messages (ORDRSP) will also react to Invoices (INVOIC).

This essentially means you must have a Provider (acq.provider) configured with an EDI Account (acq.edi_account) containing login credentials for a vendor, you must have the edi_webrick service running (EDI translator), and you must have the edi_pusher script run periodically by cron.

An open Evergreen invoice will be created for a each EDI Invoice message. Evergreen invoice entries will be created for each lineitem detected in the EDI message if that lineitem can be linked to a known Evergreen lineitem in your system. An Evergreen invoice item will be created for a whole-invoice tax.

Support for Enriched EDI with copy-level data via EDI in ORDER messages.

A new Library Setting allows the year-end close-out operation to roll over encumbrances while dumping any unspent money.

A new IDL reporter view that provides summary information for funds for reporting. The resulting table looks like a fund with four additional fields: allocated_total, spent_total, encumbrance_total, and combined_balance.

This release includes various improvements to how Evergreen processes vendor EDI responses, including order responses and invoices. Changes include architectural improvements as well as new features.

Improved template for EDI purchase orders. This theoretically just works better where the old template worked. Corrections made for interactions with ULS, Midwest Tape, Baker & Taylor, and Recorded Books especially. GIR segments in the right place.

And also the template is just more maintainable now.

THERE IS NO UPGRADE SCRIPT INCLUDED. Sites using EDI may not necessarily want to mess with what they already have working.

If you want the changes, and maybe you do, especially if you’re doing enriched ordering and/or ordering from the vendors listed above, you can extract the template changes easily enough yourself from the 950.data.seed-values.sql file. See Upgrade Notes above.

CSS colors are now defined as a pair of Template::Toolkit files, Open-ILS/src/templates/opac/css/styles.css.tt2 and Open-ILS/src/templates/opac/parts/css/colors.tt2. Evergreen administrators can customize the color scheme for a given skin by copying colors.tt2 into a template override directory and adjusting the colors as desired.

TPAC was modified to allow a logged-in user to add records from search results and record summary screens to their permanent bookbags rather than to a temporary bookbag that goes away when logged out.

TPAC has been modified so that a user will see a warning before adding a record to a temporary bookbag. This message serves to inform the user that they are adding to a temporary list that will disappear when their session ends.

A new org. unit setting has been added, opac.patron.temporary_list_warn, that will enable this warning when set. Sites may choose not to display this warning.

The user may also set a preference in their search preferences to disable this warning. The setting only works when a user is logged in, of course.

The Kids OPAC (KPAC) is a public catalog search that was designed for children and teens. Colorful menu items,large buttons, and simple navigation make this an appealing search interface for kids. Librarians will appreciate the flexible configuration of the KPAC. Librarians can create links to canned search results for kids and can apply these links by branch. The KPAC uses the same infrastructure as the Template Toolkit OPAC (TPAC), the adult catalog search, so you can easily extend the KPAC using the code that already exists in the TPAC. Finally, third party content, such as reader reviews, can be integrated into the KPAC.

In situations in which more than a single locale is configured, the TPAC header will display a locale picker based on the registered locales.

The title-level Place Hold link in TPAC will be hidden on the search result and record summary screens when there are no holdable copies on the bib. This is based on the copy, status and location holdable flags.

When enabled in config.tt2, the Place Holds link in TPAC will also be hidden if copies are available in the search location.

The library selector is now available on the numeric and expert search pages.

A journal title search is now available as a stock TPAC filter.

Public patron notes are now visible in the Account Summary box of My Account.

A new Library Setting is available that tells TPAC to automatically override hold placement failure events in cases where the patron has the permission to do so. The goal is to skip the confirmation step previously required by patrons when overriding a TPAC hold.

There is a new interface for managing Z39.50 attributes on a Z39.50 source. The interface is linked from each source name in the Z39.50 Source administrative interface.

Vandelay Item Attributes (Cataloging → MARC Import / Export → Import Item Attribute Definitions) contains a new field called "Overlay Match ID". The presence of data in this field extracted from an import-item copy indicates to the Vandelay import process that a copy overlay is requested instead of new copy creation. The value for the field is the copy id for bib record queues and the ACQ lineitem_detail ID for Acquisitions Queues. For either type of queue, however, overlay occurs against a real copy (asset.copy). In the ACQ queue case, we use the lineitem_detail ID because this is the data ACQ providers and sub-systems will have access to.

When a match point ID value is a set and a matching copy is found, the values extracted from the inbound copy data are used to replace values on the existing found copy, including the call-number label. Any fields on the inbound copy that are empty are ignored.

One use case for this feature are shelf-ready items produced by a 3rd-party (e.g. ACQ provider) and delivered to the library via MARC file for upload. The file might contain improved MARC bibliographic data as well as real barcodes (i.e. not temporary ACQ generated barcodes) for the copies already purchased through the vendor.

There is a new hold pull list interface based on the Flattener service that’s designed to perform faster than existing pull list interfaces, both in staff client display and printing.

Search filter groups support the collection of free-form search queries into named groups of named filters which can be applied to searches. The purpose is to allow systems to fine tune filters in the catalog.

Editing the groups and their entries is done in the staff client at Admin → Local Administration → Search Filter Groups.

This feature adds two additional types of standing penalty blocks to manage holds.

When a user has a standing penalty containing CAPTURE in the block list, the user can place holds (pending no HOLD block), but no holds for the user will be captured. This is effectively a policy-based freeze of the hold.

Users that have penalties with FULFILL in the block list will be able to place holds and have their holds captured (i.e. delivered) but will not be able to check out the captured holds. This is basically a way to get patrons in to pay outstanding balances.

Similar to circulation modifiers, circ policies can now be based on copy location. This also adds copy location to the circ matrix weights and to circ limit sets.

Support for later versions of XULRunner is included, which means that later improvements to XULRunner can be taken advantage of. This also means that the Firefox extension mode works in Firefox 3.6+, though some frequent tweaking will be needed due to the rapid Firefox major release schedule.

The majority of the actual changes are backend changes, but there are some significant things to note for local customizations.

The operator change dialog has a new dropdown allowing the selection of a Temporary, Staff, or Permanent authtoken. The first option provides a temporary operator change as has typically been done through this menu item. Staff uses a normal staff login authtoken for a multi-hour timeout. Permanent is a staff change that disregards the previous login instead of allowing it to be recovered by using the menu item again.

Entries for bill payment and hold placement are now available in the Work Log.

Support is now available to create a credit card payment type in the SIP Fee Paid message. There is also now support for SIP clients to retrieve and display a detailed/itemized list of billings to the patron.

For fresh installs of the staff client a common issue is people remembering what hostname to specify. If you are building your own staff clients you can now fill this in automatically.

You can specify this when configuring Evergreen with a new configure option:

--with-initialhost=example.org

It is also possible to specify when building the staff client itself using the INITIAL_HOST variable:

make INITIAL_HOST=example.org build