Duplicate hold warning

EG 3.2.4

We have gotten a couple requests from our libraries to bring this functionality back, as well.

The staff who have reported this would use the message to confirm the title was already on hold so a duplicate wouldn't be placed.

With the added ability to place multiple holds at once, this fail-safe no longer exists. I agree with Anna that it should only appear if the multiple holds function was not used when placing the hold.

I'm wondering if there are two different situations being discussed here.

It sounds like Anna is talking about a patron placed hold and John is talking about a staff placed hold.

For the patron placed hold, the situation I can think of where there would be no warning about a duplicate hold is where the patron has the HOLD_EXISTS.override permission, and the library setting opac.patron.auto_overide_hold_events is set to TRUE

For the staff placed hold, when the library setting circ.holds.max_duplicate_holds is set to TRUE and the staff user has CREATE_DUPLICATE_HOLDS permission, there is no warning when duplicate holds are placed.

I would think both situations would benefit from a warning, but if I'm reading it right, maybe these should be separate bugs.

At least for our setup, we allow all patrons the HOLD_EXISTS permission, but only staff members have the CREATE_DUPLICATE_HOLDS permission. We have auto_override_hold_events unset.

Because Anna mentioned the multiple holds function, it sounded like they allow patrons the duplicate holds permission, which is why I thought they were the same bug.

In our setup, patrons are still notified when they try to place a duplicate hold. They can override it, but they are notified first.

With the multiple holds functionality, now users with the CREATE_DUPLICATE_HOLDS permission aren't notified at all.

If it isn't the same situation, it sounds like simply unsetting auto_override_hold_events would allow the duplicate holds message to display for patrons.

Just to clarify, I'm getting complaints from both staff and patrons, so if it's that broken up on the backend and can't be fixed in one go, adding another bug is fine with me.

Hello, we enable the feature from bug #1694058, and have received feedback from staff about missing the warning also.

The majority of the time our staff are just placing a single hold, and they were used to relying on the warning to not place duplicate holds. I think the work flow is that a customer asks about a title, so the first step is to search the catalog to see if we have that title at all, then place a hold for them. In the past they could just try and place the hold and were informed of duplicates. It doubles the work for staff to stop once they know the title exists, go to the patron's record and check the patron's holds for duplicates. I think it is frustrating to staff also to have to check 100% of the time for the 1 in 20 time that there is already a duplicate. And it also requires that staff visually parse the patrons list of hold, which can be difficult when a customer has a large number of holds.

I've also heard reports of staff using a workflow that involves using the back button after placing a hold, which now results in duplicate holds being placed, but used to just result in the override dialog.

I would like the system to act like it previously did, if the num holds dropdown is left at 1, show a warning and override if duplicate holds already exist. If the setting is set to >1, then don't show the warning and override.

We don't allow customers to place duplicate holds, so we haven't heard this complaint from customers.

Another solution to this issue would be to give the user another indication that holds already exist. Maybe the place a hold screen could check for duplicate holds when the patron info is loaded, and give a warning up front "Patron already has x holds on this title".

Josh

I was looking at the design of the place multiple holds feature, to see how it could be changed to get the old behavior.

I noticed that the num holds only shows up when a single title is selected, so all the targets sent to open-ils.circ.holds.test_and_create.batch should be the same.

So maybe the open-ils.circ.holds.test_and_create.batch function could detect when all the targets are the same, and there are more than one of them, and pass a flag to open-ils.circ.holds.create which would be added to the current @existing checks, so they would only be checked and bypass the override when multiple holds are being placed at once?

Josh

Changing Importance to High as this impacts service to users, potentially causing longer wait times for holds. It can also skew statistics used to make purchasing decisions.