On 18-Jun-2008, at 09:02 , Bill Erickson wrote:
On Wednesday 18 June 2008 5:20 Brandon W. Uhlman wrote:
The SIP2 standard specifically says that the ACS 'can send this date
field in any format it wishes'. Since the format currently being
returned by Evergreen and used in handle_checkout seems to be working
with most SCs, and since I like consistency, I elect to use that
format. Larry Wall once said about Perl, "it generally does what you
want, unless what you want is consistency." We can do better. :)
I agree with the spirit of this patch, but I'll let David comment
on it in
case he has any grand schemes I'm not aware of.
I spent a bunch of time trying to explain the curious situation of
different parts of the code using or not using the Sip::timestamp()
function to format the due date of an item and finally gave up. Let's
just leave it at "historical reasons".
Yes, all of the due dates should be treated the same way. The first
option is to change the ILS interface module so that it returns due
dates as seconds since the epoch, and then change handle_checkout to
call Sip::timestamp. The second option is to change MsgType.pm so
that it doesn't use Sip::timestamp for due dates.
Aside from the fact that the second option only changes one file in
one part of the system, the second option also has the advantage that
it's clearly working properly now for users.
Because the SIP protocol says that due dates can be in any format
(when sent from ACS to SC), then it must be the case that the SCs are
doing nothing with that field but printing, or displaying, it for the
user. Changing handle_checkout to return SIP timestamps, would
probably leave users with SIP timestamps on their slips, which would
be bad.
This patch definitely needs to be applied. Thanks Brandon.
- David
- David
--
David J. Fiander
Library Software Development
