Question

Loan is not enabled through a Self-Check machine - this happens e.g. with umlaut in user's name (or other diacritics / special characters). It looks like Alma is sending Unicode characters (a diacritic) in the middle of the patron information response message within the personal name (e.g. "ue") field, and this is causing an error at the Self-Check third party system.

Answer

The solution was found by the Library who reported the issue, as they analyzed it with their third-party system:

The “before” log on our software shows this error when the character set for SIP was set to “(IBM850) OEM Latin 1 (DOS)”. This occurred when the Alma software passed us the SIP 64 (patron information response) message. The patron name has an umlaut in their name.  We made sure our software was setup using the character set UTF-8, and the patron’s name was properly printed in the log. This is from the “after” log. It appears that our UTF-8 is now matching what Alma is set to.

Additional Information

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• Article last edited: 05-DEC-2019