KohaIls

This gem allows you to integrate Koha into your Ruby based library system by wrapping its ILSDI API and its responses in Ruby objects.

Why not use koha gem?

The koha gem is built around the Koha REST API, however our vendor's advice was not to use the REST API and for this reason we use the standard ILSDI API. If you are using the REST interface, you should probably use the koha gem.

Features

KohaIls provides method wrappers around most calls to ILSDI api and Ruby classes to wrap the responses to these calls. It also provides a wrapper around the OPAC login and fine payment API. The classes returned from the ILSDI API provide a ruby-ish API for the ILSDI response XML using sax_machine.

Configuration

There are several configuration options depending on which features you are using. At minimum, you will need to configure the base_path for your Koha installation. If you are using the gem to handle payments, you will need to specify a payments_user and a payments_password for the user you have created to handle payments. If you are using Rails, you can put this configuration into an initializer as follows.

# config/initializers/koha_ils.rb

KohaIls.configure do |config|
  # config.base_path = "http://koha.library.dk"

  # config.payments_user = '999'
  # config.payments_password = 'secretpassword'

  # config.observers = [ APIMonitor.instance ]
end

If you want to monitor Koha API usage and performance, you can also configure observers, which will hook into ILSDI requests using the Observer pattern. An example observer might look like this:

class APIMonitor
  # Ensures all updates are processed through a single object
  include Singleton

  def update(query, duration)
    Rails.logger.info "Koha request: #{query} took #{duration}"
  end
end

Usage

$ bin/console
irb> KohaIls.configuration.base_path = "http://catalogue-koha-staging.dtic.dk/"
irb> p = KohaIls.get_patron_info('999')
=> #<KohaIls::Patron>
irb> p.fines
=> [#<KohaIls::Fine]
irb> p.reservations
=> [#<KohaIls::Reservation]
irb> p.loans
=> [#<KohaIls::Loan]
irb> recs = KohaIls::ILSDI.get_records([1, 2, 3]).records
=> [#<KohaIls::Records]
irb> recs.first.items
=> [#<KohaIls::Item>]
irb> av = KohaIls.get_availability([209])
=> #<KohaIls::AvailabilityResponse @records=[#KohaIls::AvailabilityRecord]>
...etc

See lib/koha_ils/ilsdi.rb for full details.