[Koha-devel] Re: [Koha] Due dates

[Chris Cormack]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 09:00:57PM -0800, Erik Stainsby said:
> Chris,
> 
> I'm curious how you would choose to approach this issue, strategically.
> Would you go at it this by adding a separate alternate routine for 
> calculating 
> due-times as opposed to due-dates? Or replace all due dates with hourly 
> durations, then divide out the majority by whole days?  I suppose the third 
> choice might be to make hourly calcs the product of days divided by hourly 
> period currently in effect ... 
> 
> Choices, choices ... Love to hear your thoughts.
> 
Hi Erik

Ive shifted this over to the devel list as it seems to fit better there :)

My initial thought was, currently due dates are calculated by taking the
current date and adding an offset.
This currently is just a number of days. But using the Date::Manip module it
shouldnt be too hard to make this days and minutes/hours

eg
$date=&DateCalc("today","+ 3hours 12minutes 6 seconds",\$err);

For items that have a today + some number of days offset due date, we just
set to be the closing time of the library that day.

The trick then becomes setting the rules for overdues etc. 
Currently its set like this

| categorycode | itemtype | restrictedtype | rentaldiscount | reservecharge
| fine     | firstremind | chargeperiod | accountsent | chargename |
A            | ART      |           NULL |           NULL |      1.000000 |
1.000000 |           7 |         7 |          28 | Fine       |

Where the firstremind tells us that after 7 days we apply our first charge.
This will need to be changed so it handles minutes/hours as well as days.

Im still just mulling it over at this stage, It wont be making it into the
2.0 release (Paul has called for a feature freeze). But I think we could get
it into one of the 2.1.x releses

Any other suggestions gratefully accepted

Chris
--
Chris Cormack                                                     Programmer
025 500 789                                        Katipo Communications Ltd
address@hidden                                          www.katipo.co.nz