D-VDX810-4: VDX 8.1 release notes

Sort Saved Searched by last transaction date-time

We have added the ability to sort saved searches by date/time of last transaction.

New Advanced Request search on Circulation errors

We have added a new request search option to allow staff to search requests by specific circulation errors.

New action: “Cancel Now”

We have added a new variant of the “Cancel” action for use with Email and Laser transactions called “Cancel Now”.

The standard “Cancel” action asks the lender to agree to a cancellation - and does not actually cancel the request unless the Lender responds with a Cancel-Reply=Yes.

The new “Cancel Now” action simply cancels the current transaction immediately without asking for agreement from the lender and automatically moves the request on to the next Lender in the Rota.

“Cancel Now” is not available for ISO ILL transactions because the ISO ILL protocol only supports the mutually agreed form of Cancel operation.

Display issues for Requests with very many associated control numbers

Requests with very large collections of associated control numbers (1000+) were causing performance issues when library staff tried to display or edit the request.

We have now rationalised the way we pull and display control numbers associated with a given request so that the User Interface pulls them from the database in discrete batches, thereby shortening the time taken to display the record.

ILL State Table:

Requests in a Cancel-Pending state were incorrectly displaying a “REQUEST” option.

WebAdmin:

When editing users, the system was getting stuck with the first user to be edited. Searching for a different user resulted in the original user record coming up when viewing user details or attempting to edit a user.

Message Formats:

It was not possible to include phone numbers in Message Formats.

We have added a phone number modifier to the address format so that these can be included in a User Alert message format:

For example:

To display a patron’s phone number as part of their address one needs to specify the “I” modifier on the address display format.

S "Patron Telephone: %sdl" Client Postal Address

DocFind-Responder

When running multiple instances of DocFind-Responder, it was possible for more than one of the processes to try to handle the same request, this lead to one of the processes getting stuck, repeatedly failing to update a request that one of the other processes has successfully completed.

Although a rare event, the code has been updated to avoid this error in future.

Terminated requests

The “Terminated” queue stopped showing terminated requests once the lender answered “cancel reply yes”. These requests now remain visible in the queue until they are “completed”.

Local Change Request Details

If users used the Local Change Request Details action to update a pending request by re-submitting the current lender to the rota and moving it to the next rota position from the current position, the control numbers associated with the location didn’t shift appropriately, which in turn mixed up the relationship of call numbers to rota locations.

It only did this for the location that was next in the rota when doing this action, later rota positions stayed associated with their correct control and call numbers.

WebAdmin: Request Searching

The request search on Borrower Code was not working if the borrowing location was set to “Requesting Only”. The search only showed results if the borrowing location's inter-loan status was “Responder and Requester” or “Responder Only”.

This search should not be limited by inter-loan status. If a location is the borrowing location in a request it should be searchable as the “Borrower” of that request, regardless of its Inter-loan status.

Local Change Request Details after handover to Circulation

If VDX has placed a local hold so the request is now in Handover to Circulation status (HANDC).

If a library with multiple  local holdings  for  a given  request  wishes  to cancel the local circulation hold and  acquire  this  item  by  ILL  they  need  to be  able  to remove the local  holdings  from  the  rota  before  cancelling  the  current  hold this will force VDX to go to  the  next  ILL  holding  on  the  rota  -  rather than to the next local holding.

The course of action for a library with multiple local holdings who  want  to cancel the current circulation hold and acquire the item by ILL would be:
1)    Use Local Change Request Details to remove remaining local holdings
from the rota
2)    Use Cancel Local Hold to cancel the local circulation hold - and automatically move the request on to the next (ILL) Location in the rota.

Sorting Request Search results

Re-sorting search results after they have been displayed caused the second sort to only display the first page of results.

Brokering

Under certain circumstances a request from WSILL contains a client name but not a client id. When these requests get brokered - it is sometimes necessary for the brokering staff to initiate a Local Change Request Details or Request action on the brokered   request to get   it  fulfilled.  When brokering staff did this, they noticed that the broker’s name was getting substituted for the client’s name in the request.

We have now changed how these to actions behave, so that they only update the client name if it is blank to start with.

Request Title searches which start with “and” or “or” or “not”

VDX was treating title phrase  searches  that  started  with  the  words  “and” or “or” or “not” as though they  were Boolean search  terms  and  consequently  returning  errors  because  the  Boolean  searches  appeared  to be malformed.

Patron Self Registration Form:

The Self-Registration form allows patrons to self-register using a username up to 100 characters long.

However, on the login form the Username field was only 20 characters long, which meant that patrons were unable to login if their Username was longer than this.

We have now increased the size of the username field on the form.

Editing Patron record in ZPORTAL

Any fields on the user record that staff can edit in WebAdmin that do not show in ZPORTAL were getting cleared out when the patron updated their user record in ZPORTAL.

Generic Script Messaging & Shipped > 2 weeks queue:

Generic Script Messaging users have requested  that  the  “Shipped   >  2 weeks” queue should include requests that have been processed with the “Informed Shipped” action.

Automated Overdues:

The automatic overdue functionality kicks in based on the request’s status. For a lender there is no status change when the borrower has done a Returned action. This meant that overdues were being sent even though the borrower had marked the request as having been returned.

We have refined the logic of the overdue processor to take notice of when the borrower Returns the item.

ILL Actions triggered from Emails sent to lenders.

Multiple Auto Action links in email requests could be sent for processing if they were clicked in quick succession.

The first action clicked got processed correctly, but the subsequent actions were not processed correctly and appeared in the audit trail with a “00:00” timestamp which caused staff confusion when spotted in the request history views.

We have changed the code so that only the first action from an email gets processed - the others get disabled.

DocFind-Requester:

Docfind was not building a rota if the current location had a parent  location which was not set to be a region (loctyp=5).

Browser “auto-fill” actions creating requests in WebAdmin

We were seeing with some browsers (IE11 and Firefox) that if you had auto- complete/auto-fill turned on, it automatically entered the barcode saved on the patron barcode field of the request creation page, so that when staff submitted a request on behalf of a patron - it was validating the auto-filled barcode instead of the barcode they actually wanted linked to the request.

We have changed the form so that the patron barcode field cannot be auto -filled by the browsers.

Document Delivery:

The DocumentDeleter program was mis-handling the “Max Days since first notified” document expiry rule  so  that  documents  were  not  expiring  when they should have been.

Brokering:

Setting broker configuration to use the  Broker’s  delivery  address  in  place  of the requester’s delivery  address  was  not  working  when  the  referral  type  was set to “Only relay messages after item has been shipped”

Article Exchange:

VDX now supports the OCLC internal version of the Article  Exchange  API which does not require a WSKEY

Generic Script Messaging:

RenewalAnswer:Yes    was    failing    to    be    received    correctly    when    the message was triggered through VDX WebAdmin.

This was because, when a renew-yes or renew-no action is made using the  web interface, the 'Answer' attribute was not getting set.

ISO Status Or Error Message

The VDX ISO ILL Receiver was crashing when processing Status Or Error Report messages from Relais.
The driver was failing to convert 8 bit character strings to  Unicode  strings before writing them to the log files.

Article Exchange:

Documents were not getting sent via AE when request was actioned as “shipped” in the Laser protocol.

Brokering:

This is related to VDX-12738 (See Above)

When the broker sent an automated “Will Supply” message from the broker to the borrower - it was inappropriately overwriting the borrower’s delivery address with the broker’s delivery address.

Article Exchange:

VDX was failing to recognise when a lender changed the shipped delivery method from say “Email” to “Article  Exchange”.  This  meant  that  the document did not transfer to the  AE  server  when  it  should  have  done  and the AE retrieval info was not being added to the Shipped.Note.

The borrowers were unable to retrieve   the  document  that   the  lender’s thought they had sent.

Article Exchange:

VDX  was  failing  to  automatically  download   documents   from Article Exchange if there was  extraneous  text  in  the  Shipped.Notes  field (which contains the AE URL and credentials for retrieving the document)

VDX code now explicitly looks for uppercase AE field tags in the note field:

AEURL: http://oc.lc/12345 AEPASSWORD: abcdef

and ignores other text that might be present in the field.

NCIP: LookupUser

VDX was failing to process successful LookupUser responses from some Sirsi- Dynix systems.

This turned  out  to be a Circ Gateway configuration  issue  -  where  the gateway was treating  an optional field  as mandatory (and was therefore complaining when that optional field was not present in the NCIP response message)