Table of Contents

Holds Configuration

Placing and managing holds is one of the more complex aspects of the ILS integration due to the myriad of different policies etc. VuFind provides several settings for configuring the behavior of holds. Here is a summary of some of the common configuration parameters for the Holds section. Supported values depend on the ILS used, and most ILS drivers have additional settings for configuring their behavior. Check the ILS driver's configuration file (e.g. Folio.ini or KohaRest.ini) for more information.

extraHoldFields

This setting defines the fields that the user can change when placing a hold request. Values supported in VuFind are:

comments A text field for comments regarding the hold
startDate The day the hold will be activated. The hold is frozen and won't become available until this date (Supported from VuFind 8.0)
requiredByDate The last interest day for the hold. If the request is not fulfilled before this date, it will be canceled.
requestGroup A group of items that may be requested. This may affect the available pickup locations.
pickUpLocation Pickup location for the requested item.

defaultPickUpLocation

This setting defines the default pickup location selected when displaying a hold. Possible values are:

  1. An empty string to indicate that the first location is default (default setting)
  2. “user-selected” to indicate that the user always has to choose the location. This can be useful for making sure the user takes note of the pickup location.
  3. A value within the Location IDs returned by getPickUpLocations()

defaultRequiredDate

A colon-separated list used to calculate the default value for the requiredByDate field in the format days:months:years. E.g. “0:1:0” will set a “not required after” date of 1 month from the current date.

helpText

This setting allows to define a help text that is displayed when placing a hold. A single text or a translation key can be provided for all languages, or language-specific texts can be provided: 

helpText = "Help text for all languages."
helpText[en-gb] = "Help text for English language."