[Koha-devel] some informations on item status

[Paul POULAIN]

Hello,

Following some IRC chat & joshua commits, here are some explanations 
about item status :
"item status" covers 2 things :
- what is automatically set
- what is manually set

what is automatically set
=> the position of the book regarding issuing. It means wether the book 
is on issue, waiting, or "available". There is no field the DB to store 
this : the issues table is searched everytime it's needed

=> the "on order" flag, that can be set only when there is no item for a 
given book, but an order placed on it (remember a book is immediatly 
created when you place an order, in MARC as well as in non-MARC DB)

what is manually set => it's 3 different fields in items table :
- notforloan
- itemlost
- wthdrawn

Since Koha 1.x, all those fields have the following meaning : 0 means 
"no", and 1 means "yes".
So notforloan=1 basically means item is not for loan and notforloan=0 
means its not not for loan (= can be issued)

In Koha 2.0, i've added a feature that works at least for notforloan and 
MARC=ON : you can define a list of authorized values that are integers 
and used in the MARC subfield that is mapped to items.notforloan.
the rule being :
0 means "no"
>1 means "yes".

Thus, you can define why an item is "notforloan". Can be, for example 
"being repaired", or whatever you want.

The consequence is that you can have notforloan meaning :
0 : available
1 : not for loan
2 : lost
3 : withdrawn
4 : being repaired
5 : ...

and thus lost & wthdrawn fields are useless for me.

HTH
--
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)