Changing due dates for special occasions (christmas etc)

Tim,

For holiday closures, we at Wirral work out which date for a particular loan period we need to stamp the books to, then we work out the number of days for that loan period. Then we run a script via the cron to set the due days.

e.g.

for a 4 week loan period we'd use a script like:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
case $# in
2) break;
;;
*) echo '\nUsage: script-name database period_days\n' 1>&2; exit 1
esac

date
isql -Usa -P <<- END > /scratch/set_due_4week.out

use $1
go

update DUE_DATE
set PERIOD_DAYS = $2
where DUE_DATE_ID = 6
go

END
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then we'd pass the script 'prod_talis' as the database and for example, '30' as the new loan period. We'd run this script over a few days via the cron, passing the new loan period parameters each day, until on the last day it would get passed the normal '28' to reset the correct value.

e.g. the cron line would be:
/bin/su - talis -c "/users/talis/set_due_4week prod_talis 30"

then
/bin/su - talis -c "/users/talis/set_due_4week prod_talis 29"

then
/bin/su - talis -c "/users/talis/set_due_4week prod_talis 28"

Clear as mud eh?

I'd be interested in seeing how you go about it though.

Cheers
Mark

Pretty much the same way. Although for christmas we basically give everyone an extra week. (we are a public library so don't work to ends of term etc), so a script which does as you described, sets the due date days to whatever we need. I simply pass the DUE_DATE_ID and PERIOD_DAYS to the script.

We give people a week, to try and spread out the returns after christmas, and to keep the due weekday to a day that is the borrowers 'usual' day in.

A cron script running in the morning of the appropraite week either giveth or taketh away that extra week.

I also have a script that will toggle a single site's due dates from the defaults that every site uses, to a set of 'emergency' due dates (and back again). (due date types pre defined in talis) which can then have duedates changed at will. I use these for times when a library is closed for an extended period and we don't want lots of books coming back.