D-VDX740-4: VDX 7.4 release notes

CGSA Runs very slowly when retrieving large numbers of hits from WorldCat

We have made some changes the underlying Z39.50 search component to make its handling of large sets of holdings more efficient. This has brought most searches aback to the ~10 seconds mark.

Patron Request API:

We have changed the VDX PatronRequestAPI server so that it now returns separate error codes for:

“Patron Banned”, “Patron Card Expired”, “Unrecognised User”

In the past it returned “unrecognised user” for all three conditions.

 Note: There is a separate task (DELSE-2594) to have the Navigator Patron UI recognise and display these new status codes.

Brokering:

Conditional workflows were not working as specified, because requests were automatically emitting “Not Supplied” message at end of rota, preventing the broker from intervening and dealing with conditional responses from their suppliers.

User Alerts:

User alerts were displaying simple Due Dates as date/time stamps with the time always set to “00:00:00”.

These dates are now displayed correctly without the unwanted time fields.

Brokering:

When a brokered request was set to always relay messages and there were multiple lenders in the broker’s rota, if the original borrower answered “No” to a relayed Condition, the updated everything to Not Supplied EXCEPT the brokered request, which continued down its rota.

We have fixed this so that when a borrower responds “No” to a Conditional message, this now Terminates the broker’s request - cancelling any current transaction between Broker and Supplier and closing the transaction between Borrower and Broker.

ILL Drivers:

The system was only recording the transmission date in the service-date-time field if a request message was sent after the request had previously reached “end of rota”. It now correctly set both time and date.

Brokering:

When a Borrower sent a note after a brokered request had been received or renewed, a message-relay Rejection message was generated, and the note was not sent through to the lender.

ISO ILL / NLA Gateway:

Expiry date removed from request when it goes through a VDX 6.0.1 gateway system.

When relaying a request through the NLA’s payment gateway, the ISO ILL driver was recalculating the expiry date instead of relaying the one already in the request.

UnityUK:

Search parameters were getting lost when copying BL Work Queue saved searches.

Brokering:

When the system is unable to relay a given message from one side of the broker to the other - due to mismatching protocols, the log message was not reporting which action was being rejected. This omission has now been rectified.

ILL Drivers:

The Laser and ISO ILL protocol drivers were being installed with “requester side expiry” enabled.

The install has been changed so that

1. requester-side expiry is never enabled by default - and
2. It will not override whatever setting the drivers have previously had.

ILL Drivers:

The system was always setting the transmission date in the service date-time field to the date and time the request was originally transmitted - rather than the date and time the current message was transmitted.

Brokering:

When a brokered request was in Renew Pending state and the borrower returned it, the system generated a relay rejection message since the Return action was missing from the state transitions for the brokered renew pending status.

Site Actions:

The “Bulk Action Disabled” flag was being ignored for Site Actions, so site actions always showed up for bulk action even when they were set not to.

Email messaging:

There were problems sending ISO ILL emails on Solaris systems,

the third-party email library used by VDX was crashing due to different VDX components using different versions of same underlying code libraries.

7.3 Patch script problem

The 7.3 patch script was silently failing to generate the request domain

Article Exchange

We found that in VDX 7.3 the Article Exchange interactions were not working in conjunction with the live AE services, they only worked with the test and development version. We have now recompiled the VDX AE software to work with the live https-based services as well as test http-based services.

BL ArtEmail & Copyright Cleared requests

When requests were marked as being “Copyright Cleared” the BL ArtEmail “RZ” prefix was not being included in the Request message sent to the British

Library. This omission has now been fixed.