Hi all,

Apologies, have got distracted from mailing lists and missed these replies last 
week...

The existing app is called Datacard and I know very little about it - installed 
before my time by another department, etc. But basically it prints our library 
cards, so it needs the appropriate user data (name, barcode, other ID details). 
Previously it pulled these from PeopleSoft over ODBC, but with our migration 
things are different and decisions were made so now for a class of users the 
data is only available in Alma.

A nightly extract of data to a Koha (or other) install wouldn't work because 
we're needing the data at the point of sign-up to the library so the card can 
be printed.

It sounds very much like it comes down to seeing if there's an upgrade to 
Datacard we can write a business case for and in the meantime continue to type 
or copy/paste the data by hand at point of need. Not the ideal situation but at 
least it's a relatively small class of users affected.

Thanks,

Deborah 


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Cary 
Gordon
Sent: Wednesday, 24 September 2014 3:59 a.m.
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] REST vs ODBC

Could you reveal anything about what the existing application (EA) is and what 
it does?

We don't know what the EA was connected to, so there can't know if Koha would 
work as middleware. It might be simpler to write your own middleware in Symfony 
(I have grown fond of Guzzle), or some other framework and just pull the data 
into a database that has the same structure as your old system.

Thanks,

Cary

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Fitchett, Deborah < 
deborah.fitch...@lincoln.ac.nz> wrote:

> Morning, all,
>
> We have a small dilemma:
>
>
> 1.       Our brand new Alma system provides access to a bunch of data via
> RESTful API. It’s on The Cloud so we’re not going to be getting direct 
> access to the database anytime soon.
>
>
> 2.       We have an existing application that would be more efficient if
> it could get that data, but which only uses ODBC. (I’m told other 
> available drivers are:
> - Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE
> - Microsoft Office
> - Microsoft OLE DB Provider
> - Microsoft Datashape
> - OLE DB Provider
> - SQL Server Native Client 10.0)
>
> Does anyone know if there’s any middleware out there that could make 
> these two things talk to each other, or do we give this up as a “Would 
> have been nice, but <shrug>”?
>
> Nāku noa, nā
>
> Deborah Fitchett
> Senior Advisor, Digital Access
> Library, Teaching and Learning
>
> p +64 3 423 0358
> e 
> deborah.fitch...@lincoln.ac.nz<mailto:deborah.fitch...@lincoln.ac.nz> 
> | w library.lincoln.ac.nz<http://library.lincoln.ac.nz/>
>
> Lincoln University, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki New Zealand's specialist 
> land-based university
>
>
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--
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com

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