The intended behavior in Koha is that when one edits an item to change the shelving location, that value will always be pushed to the permanent shelving location as well, except for two hard-coded exceptions, CART and PROC. Through careful setup, one can circumvent this behavior and allow for edits to the shelving location without changing the permanent shelving location (bug 30909). That more complicated setup could be avoided in most cases if we simply added a system preference to define a list of shelving locations for which permanent location should not be updated. So, for example, one could create a location of "Display" and tell Koha to never update permanent shelving location when setting shelving location to Display.
+1 I quite like this idea, it would make it more flexible and move the config out of frameworks, which is a bit too 'magic' right now.
Andrew, could you help me by providing a scenario for this. I'm trying to wrap my head around this one, and I'm just having a little trouble connecting the dots.
(In reply to Christopher Brannon from comment #2) > Andrew, could you help me by providing a scenario for this. I'm trying to > wrap my head around this one, and I'm just having a little trouble > connecting the dots. We have an item that normally lives in the shelving location GEN (for "General Stacks"). We put the item into a display. We want the shelving location in the catalog to reflect that the item isn't in its normal place, but we don't want to worry about getting that item back into the display if it gets checked out and we don't want to edit it again. If we set: items.location = DISPLAY items.permanent_location = GEN With UpdateItemLocationOnCheckin syspref containing _ALL_: _PERM_ Then the item will show DISPLAY in the catalog but return to GEN when it gets checked in. But right now it takes a fairly complicated setup to edit items.location without koha also edited items.permanent_location.
This would be hugely helpful or our staff! We have six branches, most of which switch out displays on a monthly basis, so it comes up a lot. Right now we have to batch edit a stack of items to temporary shelving location of On Display and then go back and batch edit them a second time to put their permanent shelving location to whatever it should be.
This sounds like a great solution to the problem we are also facing. We did all the complicated setup to get items.location and items.permanent_location to operate independently for Displays. But this function keeps breaking with each update. Currently, there is a bug 31187 which is trying to address the broken function in the batch editor. Having a sys pref to specify our display locations to act like CART and PROC would be great. I am imagining it would work like this: we set the location to DISPLAY for an item or a batch of items. The system knows that DISPLAY is a special case and doesn't update the permanent_location. Then when the item is checked out and then returned, the location will show the original location. Great idea!
It would be an extra piece, but it would be great to have the option to have the temporary location code time out after a certain date. Say you have a seasonal children's Halloween book on display starting mid-September. It would be great to set it to expire after October 31st, or a set number of days...either way.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 14962 ***