ILS Driver Troubleshooting

If you are having difficulty getting VuFind® to talk to your ILS, this page offers tips that may help.

Each driver has its own configuration file in the $VUFIND_HOME/config/vufind directory inside your VuFind® installation. If you have not already, you should copy this file into your $VUFIND_LOCAL_DIR/config/vufind directory and configure it appropriately. Comments within each file should help to guide you. For example, Voyager users need to fill in the Voyager.ini file. Make sure you have configured your ILS correctly!

VuFind® talks to your ILS in real time on search result pages. By looking at these communications, you can sometimes find clues about what is going wrong. Follow these steps:

• Open your browser's debugging toolbar (hit F12 or select it from the appropriate menu).
• Switch to the toolbar's Net or Network tab, and make sure the panel is activated.
• Switch to the “XHR” sub-tab (XHR is short for XML-HTTP-Request, the communication method used for AJAX calls).
• Perform a search in VuFind®. You should see a line in the toolbar that says something like “GET JSON?method=getItemStatuses”. Expand this line.
• Click the “Response” tab of the getItemStatuses line. This may show you an error message or some other helpful clue. If you find the response hard to read inside Firebug, you can also right-click the line and “Copy Location” in order to paste it into another browser tab.

If you are seeing errors but don't know what to do about them, please get in touch with the vufind-tech mailing list or use one of our other support options.

See ILS Drivers, Part 1 for further discussion of ILS drivers.