Hi Danielle, while the cardnumber can be null in the database I think it at least used to create a lot of problems in other places. I'd really hesitate to make it optional without some more research and testing first.

I researched a bit and found 2 bugs about patrons without cardnumbers: bug 14562, bug 13780

I can imagine it might also cause problems if hidepatronname is used - as that will show the cardnumber as the only information on the patron record and link it. But haven't tested that.

Well, it's not so much that they don't want to add a cardnumber as it is they don't want to overwrite it.

A lot of universities update patron data every semester with data from the school.  The particular workflow it to import patrons from university data, with a populated cardnumber (same as attribute value (unique - college id).

Then student comes into library to get a library-issued cardnumber and that borrower record is updated with that value. 

They want to, after that, be able to update patron data matching on the attribute (college id) for future semesters .... but if the cardnumber is required, that would be overwritten and the library-isssued cardnumber disappears.  Usually you can make updates by only including the columns you want to change and leaving columns out you don't want to update.

Hm, I understand - we have a library requesting something similar. We currently restore the cardnumbers with SQL after importing, which works but is not a good solution. I think another way to make this work could be a 'don't update if not empty' flag for the import or something similar?

We could also make the cardnumber optional, but I think we'd have quite a few libraries run into the mentioned bugs then. Not sure what's best.

Can the cardnumber just be optional with the overwrite option?

CCing Stéphane,
I would like to get your opinion on this point.
Do you have the same problem when you migrate/import patrons to Koha?

(In reply to Jonathan Druart from comment #6)
> CCing Stéphane,
> I would like to get your opinion on this point.
> Do you have the same problem when you migrate/import patrons to Koha?

This is a real problem as the library wants to update several times a semester.

Katrin I read the bugs mentioned about missing cardnumber or empty string and that would not be the case here. That patrons have cardnumbers already, we just don't want to overwrite the existing cardnumber when importing/overwriting based on a unique attribute (university ID) and want to leave out the cardnumber column.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 23077 ***