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    Incorrect "no requestable items" message in the OPAC (intermittent)

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    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 18.01

    Description:
    This problem is becoming more urgent every day. Now I am getting multiple reports of patrons not being able to request items via the OPAC. If the patrons cannot use the request item function, the system might just as well be down. Here is an example that I researched myself: a UMA patron tried to request a book that HAM owns, and got the message "no requestable items".

    A staff person at UMA then looked at the patron and item records, and tried logging in to the OPAC as the patron and requesting the item, with the same result. She called me. I looked at the patron and the item, as well as tab37 in both HAM and UMA. Then I logged in as the patron and successfully requested the item.

    The fact that these problems are intermittant but widespread across all ADMs, and that everything was working properly before 11/22, makes me think that it is not a problem with tables set up, patron or item records. It gets much worse as the day goes on and the load on the system increases. Could this be a problem with reading and writing Oracle and ALEPH tables? The fact that we get error messages, and then when we try again several minutes or hours later, the system does find the record it previously told us does not exist would seem to indicate this.

    I can't estimate the percentage of incorrect "no requestable items" message in the OPAC. We hear about it from patrons, and have heard it at all ADMs, but we are still getting pull slips (cir-12) each morning, so know that at least some of them are going through correctly. When I tried it on test yesterday, one out of six requests got that message incorrectly.

    Resolution:
    From site:

    "Some library staff had insisted that the title request button appear on the holdings display of the opac, despite our telling them that it wouldn't work there. To prove the point, we put the button there on prod at about the same time SP 485 was installed. Having made the point by having every request initiated there fail, we removed that button yesterday.

    "Testing web-initiated holds so far today has yielded 100% good results."

    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013