Yes, this would be especially helpful for new libraries coming to Koha who need to test notices before crons are turned on.

You can do it by running the message queue in a very targeted way, but that takes more back end work, making it less accessible to libraries. 

Also, changes to overdue notices need to wait until the overdues run overnight to make sure nothing goes wrong.

For a workaround when testing SendAllEmailsTo could be helpful.

Not being able to preview or test these prior to "going live" with them currently causes undue stress and anxiety on those of us changing the notices and we fear breaking legit notices that are going to other patrons. This would be a fantastic advancement for being able to preview notices prior to confirming those changes.

Library staff should be able to preview all notices and slips without any work-arounds or need for a testing environment.

(In reply to George Williams (NEKLS) from comment #4)
> Library staff should be able to preview all notices and slips without any
> work-arounds or need for a testing environment.

The problem is that you can't generate a preview of the notices without data. With TT you can potentially pull date from almost everywhere in the system. 

Just saying, this is not something that's easily solved.

(In reply to Katrin Fischer from comment #5)
> (In reply to George Williams (NEKLS) from comment #4)
> > Library staff should be able to preview all notices and slips without any
> > work-arounds or need for a testing environment.
> 
> The problem is that you can't generate a preview of the notices without
> data. With TT you can potentially pull date from almost everywhere in the
> system. 
> 
> Just saying, this is not something that's easily solved.

I've been thinking about that... 

We can't generate a perfect preview without data, but we could preview a lot of the notice. I've had librarians just want to check if their HTML/CSS is right regardless of the data passed into the notice. 

Maybe we could have a confirm box where someone tries to preview without data we could say "Warning! You have not provided any data. Preview may not fully resemble actual notice." or something like that.

I don't know. Just a thought I've had lately.

We could do that, but it might not include the most critical, like a view of a list of items.

I wonder if we could do a pop-up form for people to enter some information about objects used. Like if it uses a borrower-Object, ask for a borrowernumber... but of course that would add a lot of additional complexity.

(In reply to Katrin Fischer from comment #7)
> We could do that, but it might not include the most critical, like a view of
> a list of items.
> 
> I wonder if we could do a pop-up form for people to enter some information
> about objects used. Like if it uses a borrower-Object, ask for a
> borrowernumber... but of course that would add a lot of additional
> complexity.

I suppose another option could be something like the TestBuilder. Maybe a NoticeBuilder that creates fake objects with fake data, although that might have limited utility for complex cases.

But maybe not a bad starting point.

Which one would be useful? It is straighforward but need to be done one by one. Added "HOLD" to show how easy it is (and it's certainly not as easy for all of the notice templates ofc).

Created attachment 170940 [details] [review]
Bug 29490: Add preview for HOLD