D-VDX820-4: VDX 8.2 release notes

VDX-11050

NCIP: UTC dates

Circ interops with Pioneerland’s Sierra system had shown up a problem with how VDX / Circ Gateway handled dates in Universal Time.

We have fixed two issues to do with NCIP Date/Time handling

1. The Circ Gateway was displaying the correct dates in the wrong format when logging them - which lead to confusion for support staff investigating date problems.
2. VDX was receiving correctly formed UTC dates but was translating them to local time, leading to the dates in VDX and the dates in the linked circ system getting out of synch.

VDX-11129

Web Admin: Error saving bib searches

Sometimes, VDX would silently fail to save a bibliographic search.

This happened if the search being saved included a large number of Z39.50 search targets.

VDX-12122

British Library audit notes

When a public note was added to a BL request, the request history entry failed to display the BL’s VDX number. Other note types did not cause this problem.

VDX-12689

Web Admin: Document Delivery

Clicking the “Back” button from the ILL Attachment details button was not taking the user back to the request details screen.

VDX-12715

Patron Authentication and circ interops with ALMA systems

When doing remote authentication the alternative barcode should use what is returned by the remote system, previously the system was automatically upper casing these circ barcodes. We have circ systems that return an alphabetic user ID that is lower case, when we later send an NCIP message Receive the item in the circ system - the call was failing because VDX had upper cased the given circ user ID (aka “alternative barcode”).

VDX-12762

Web Admin: Searching for requests locked by the current user.

The “User Lock” search field on the standard searches screen should not have been allowing users to enter search criteria (and thus get an “invalid criteria” error when they do).

This search is solely to enable the current user to look for requests locked by (or assigned to) themselves.

It was never intended for a user to be able to search for requests locked by another named user.

VDX-12775

ILL record library name field lengths standardised

The Requester-Name field was only 80 characters long, while the Responder- Name field was 240 characters long. We have now made both fields 240 characters long.

VDX-12776

ILL Message time stamps

The date last action that gets displayed depends on the type of action:

Last Action / Message

Shipped

Received

Returned

Other

VDX-12785

Web Admin: Searching for requests via Due Date

When choosing Due Date in the standard request search, nothing would happen after clicking the Submit button for the first time in the current session. However, using the keyboard “ENTER” key worked OK, and after that the submit button worked correctly for all subsequent Due Date searches.

Other standard searches did not have this problem, and the due date search worked OK when used from the advanced search page.

VDX-12787

Generic Script and Article Exchange

VDX users were unable to supply Generic Script requests via Article Exchange because Generic Script does not convey requested delivery method.

Documents could only be uploaded into Article Exchange if the requested

delivery method was set to an appropriate electronic delivery format

We have amended VDX so that there is now a user permission to define whether the “Add Document” option appears when VDX lenders are responding to Generic Script requests.

The new permission is:

Web: Show Add Document button on Generic Script requests

If this permission is set, then the “Add Document” option will be available when the VDX lender is viewing Generic Script “Copy” requests.

VDX-12792

ISO ILL Request Date not updating after end of rota

The message time stamp was not getting updated when a request went from End-Of-Rota to a new added location. The new request message kept the timestamp of when the request went to End-of-Rota.

VDX-12799

Window System Admin Client crashing when viewing stored ISO protocol records

There were two situations which caused the VDX Windows client to crash:

1. Search for an ISO request, view details, view ILL_MESSAGE record for the Request action, go to menu Request - View PDU Dialog
2. Search for a request in ILL PDUs domain (under System Management) and go to details view

Both are because the yaz memory is not being initialised.

VDX-12800

Patron Request API

VDX was not sending the correct error code when a patron request failed because the patron’s library’s ILL operations have been temporarily suspended.

VDX now returns error “099 Unable to provide requested service”

with reason set to “library operations temporarily suspended: no new requests being accepted”

VDX-12802

Web Admin: Removing patron expiry date

When editing patron details through Web Admin, if an ILL staff member removed the patron expiry date, no warning was given that the expiry date cannot be removed.

A warning message is now displayed if a user tries to remove the expiry date.

VDX-12804

VDX “Anvraagen” system

The hosts changed their SMTP server, after which their VDX has been unable to send email reports to multiple recipients.

The problem turned out to be that the addresses in the recipient list being sent from VDX were separated by semi-colons when the email protocol RFC-2822 says they should be comma-separated.

NOTE: Most SMTP servers are happy to accept either form of punctuation.

VDX-12815

Oracle Context index running slowly

Each oracle keyword index search was getting run twice, when it need only be run once.

VDX-12817

WebAdmin: Shipped screen took no notice of current service type

When a lender changed the current service type via the “Change Current Service Type action - the subsequent shipped screen was not paying attention to the current-service-type but continued to work from the original primary requested-service-type.

To fix this problem, we have added the ability to change the current service type from within the Shipped action screen as well as from the “Change Current Service Type” action.

When the service type is updated from loan to copy or vice versa, the due date field is displayed or hidden appropriately so that the due date is only visible if the selected shipped service type is “loan”

Service type set to Loan with Due Date displayed:

Service Type set to Copy with Due Date hidden

VDX-12820

ZPORTAL and Internet Explorer

When creating a request from the results of a bibliographic search,

IE was generating the error message: “You must enter text with 256 or fewer characters” if any bibliographic field exceeded 256 character in length. This is because the screen field was being limited to 256 character, even though the related fields in the underlying database were considerably larger than 256 characters.

This error was not being generated by Chrome or Firefox.

We have now changed the XSL stylesheet so that IE no longer generates this unwanted error.

VDX-12821

Windows System Admin

There was a problem with the display of ILL Service attributes.

Payment Methods were getting displayed as Media Types, because the system was looking up the attribute number but not referencing which attribute list the number belonged to, so Payment Method 5 (Invoice) was being displayed as Media Type 5 (Audio-Recording)