Hi, On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Frédéric DEMIANS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I see 3 obvious levels, no more, in the vast majority of situations: > > 1. Koha -- global settings > 2. Library -- settings for each library > 3. Branch -- branches belong to one library inherit parameters from > it and can override some of them
Deeper hierarchies are not implausible. For example, a Koha database used by a consortium of academic libraries could have six levels: Consortium (Koha DB) : University : Campus : Library : Branch : Circulation/Reserve Desk While I admit this is a stretch, I didn't want to arbitrarily limit the maximum depth of the hierarchy, nor require that any user specify a fixed number of levels. For example, my former home state of Alaska has a lot of mixed library consortia, i.e., consortia that are based on geographic area and can have academic, public, historical society, and school libraries as members. In such a consortium, the academic library may want four or five levels, while the public library needs only two, and the historical society one. With the proposed parent/child structure, there is no need to require that the tree of libraries and branches be balanced, thus allowing "simple" and "complicated" libraries coexist in the same database. The other advantage of a parent/child structure is that except for the special case of the global level, most code will not have to care about what level of organization it's dealing with at the moment - it just has to know what the current branch is. Further, you don't have to have separate library and branch entities - a library and branch are the same thing from the point of view of the code, i.e., an entity that can have policy settings, own items, and circulate, and have parents and children. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Koha Application Developer LibLime [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: 1-888-564-2457 x709 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
