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videos:ils_drivers_2

Video 20: ILS Drivers, Part 2: Introduction to the MultiBackend Driver

The twentieth VuFind® instructional video provides an introduction to the MultiBackend ILS Driver and related functionality. These tools will allow you to connect VuFind® to multiple library systems and allow your users to manage multiple library accounts.

Video is available as an mp4 download or through YouTube.

Transcript

This is a machine-generated transcript and will be corrected as time permits.

hello and welcome to this bluefinder tutorial video i'm erin mayella and i work with wilfind at the national library of finland today i'm going to introduce the multi-backend ils driver the multiback and driver allows multiple ios drivers to be connected to a single woofing installation it's uh it works just like any other ils driver from the will find point of view and uh allows one to connect to any combination of actual ils drivers so if you have multiple ilses that you import records from you can also get status information patreon services etc using the multi-back-end driver from all of these back-end systems multiback and driver also works with multi-ils login method and allows you to choose the target or the backend that you use when you log in to find using the ios login method also users can have several library cards connected to their different dialysis so if you have like if you're patroning in multiple libraries you can have all of the library cards connected to the same account in bluefinder especially useful when you use something like shibboleth for for the main authentication some of the features of the multiback and driver are that it can proxy any ils driver method to the actual drivers and vice versa it can also detect some of the features that are supported so that the not all the back-end actual drivers that connect to the different ils systems have to support every every single method or every single function that the ils drivers are are possible in wireless drivers with multi-ls like i mentioned it allows directing to login target from list of allowed ones and you can also choose which ones to allow so there can be like uh seven different ioses but only three of them uh allow you to log in to have some patreon functions rest of them maybe provide a holdings and status information and such and uh and as a feature it makes everything transparent to the actual wireless drivers so so the the actual drivers don't need to know that they are being called by the multiback and driver and the same goes the other way around wolfhank doesn't need to know at least usually that it's connected to the multiback and driver but there are some prerequisites for using the multi-vacuum driver all the records that are indexed in will find solar index need to have a source prefix that indicates the ls they are connected to usually this is something that that's prefix dot and then the actual identifier also this allows you to index uh the same identifier from several sources without them overlapping uh for wu finds uh indexing with solarmark uh adding adding a source prefix is documented as this url pointed in the presentation also patreons have a source prefix so when you log in using a library card you get the source prefix uh on the user name or the catalog password on the catalog username and there are some requirements uh for instance with holds the source prefix of the patreon and the actual record to be held needs to be the same so that the actual the actual ios connection doesn't try to do something weird like uh like a place a hold on a completely different item most functions use either the patrons or the bibliographic record source prefix to determine the ils to connect to and this means that this information has to be available to the functions and also when checking for support of of services and functionality there are some limitations so the multiback and driver only connects to a single ios driver at a time and doesn't merge the results from multiple ilses there are several reasons for this one being that it gets complicated pretty pretty easily and when when there is actual functionality that the patron can initiate like renewing uh loans or or changing pattern information and things like that uh it would get overly complicated easily get item status is an exception to this as it's uh it has been designed to actually carry the statuses of several items so it can also multiplex the cost to the different wireless drivers there are also some non-ils specific functions that always use the configure default driver for instance uh getting new items from the catalog is always using using the default wireless because there is no no kind of source information available from wufind what's the use also some of the settings in config in i in the catalog section for instance are global so it's often necessary to set them to use the driver configuration for instance the host mode could use the driver setting so that the drivers can now actually tell what the real possibilities are some functions um typically some that are unconditionally an enable you will find that cannot be configured may return a default empty value whatever it is for for the function call in question unless a driver is configured for the source this means that you it's possible to import new data sources without having to uh have have configuration for all of them in the in the multiback and driver uh multiback and driver mix takes care of the prefixes so when a record that has a source prefix is related or the identifier is really related to the actual ios driver the actual driver doesn't get the prefix it only gets the actual identifier so they don't need to care and also when when the ios driver returns an identifier for instance of patreon id it will be automatically prefixed when it comes to woofing or other other parts of bluefinder also worth mentioning is that the multibacking works great with data application so if you have the same same records from several sources it is possible to duplicate them although there is no gripping method for doing that in google find but there is a page describing how this can be done so now i'm going to move to the demo part and we have a pretty plain blue fine installation uh this has been set up with an empty index uh with some pretty basic settings and i'm going to walk through the different settings required for importing the records with the source prefix and also how to set up the multi-back-end driver i will be using the demo driver for both sort of back-ends that i create for for things to remain simple but they could be substituted by any other ios driver so we will need to start by doing a little bit of configuration like creating some properties files for the import and i will i'm just going to stop the presentation so that i can actually copy and paste information so uh i like to make it so that all the configuration locally configured is in the local directory you could add them into the import directory but i really like it to keep things separate so i'm going to take the import uh import properties not marked properties and copy it to the local imports directory for two different backends i will call them demo one demo two then we will make some changes just to make sure that import takes into account our locally defined rules for the marketplace now that we have these main properties files set up we will need to create these properties faster define the rules on how to add the prefixes let's just copy and paste this from the example do the same for the other one [Music] just make it a different prefix for the mod 2. so now we have the main import properties files and also the marg properties files for these imports the second step is to do the actual imports in this example i'm using some of the mark files that are provided in blue find for tests so it's easy to get things going so now we are importing the journals mark using the demo one properties file this won't take long because the file is really small it's like 10 records and we will do the same for the same file with the demo 2 properties this means that we will get two sets of data that are just very same records but with two different prefixes now if you go to we'll find and do a search for our records you can see that there is like a like this one this has uh has the demo one as the prefix and then the actual record identifier after the period and we also have this very same record with the demo 2 identifier our prefix i'll make a search so we can see both records on the results list uh now this is using the sample driver by default so there is nothing very useful in the in the uh holdings information or the item statuses so i'm going to enable the multi-packing driver and set it up to use the two different demo back-ends so there are a couple of settings i will be changing in config.ini in catalog section there are a couple of settings the driver to use is the main one and now it's using the sample driver but we're switching to multi-backend also i'm going to enable library cards so that i can add a couple of different cars to my account just to show how it works then we will take the actually take the default d mode of iron i copy it for both of the backends so multiback-end is looking for for the ini drive file for each ios by its name what's defined in the remote backend configuration we'll get to that in just a moment now i will change the configuration files i will add identifiers this is uh specific to the demo driver because the other basket get their sort of uh session storage mixed up i will also set up some static holdings information so that we can see that the information is actually coming from a different backend so for demo one i will make make it say that the test sample one record is located in demo one library and it's available i'll do the same with the demo too i just give it a different identifier so that students get mixed up uh in a real ios driver this is the equivalent to having a different url or different uh other connection information that you use to connect to the ios so we'll just pretend that defines the actual ils that we are using let's just make it like unavailable so it's even easier to see so demo2 driver has uh has this service information for this sample with test sample one record and finally we need to set up the multiback in the driver to actually look for these drivers and i have this minimal multiback and ini file here there are three different sections uh that we are going to add the general one mostly that just defines uh what's the default driver in case uh uh we are using functionality that is not the does not have some information like like getting the new items from the ios this is only used for those functions and uh usually we get this based on the people traffic vehicle based on information let's just paste this file here then the driver section so it tells uh which prefixes use which driver so demo one prefix uses the dimmer driver and the same goes with demo2 the login checks and defines which drivers can be used for for patrons to login or patrons to other library cards i'll enable it for both cars at least for now so you can see how it works in real life and now if i've done everything correctly we can refresh the search results and see that the record from 1 is now located in demo one library and this the second record is in team of do library so they are connected to the different demo drivers now when i log in ah there's one thing i forgot to do that was to switch from uh the database authentication to the multi-ils authentication so let's go back to changing the conflict of the imf there is in the authentication section now it's using the database authentication but i will just switch it to multi-ios you could also use something like a choice authentication with multi ios and uh so that you could have like a fibonacci authentication in addition to choosing a library from for library card authentication so there are several possibilities on how to combine these but to keep it simple i'll just enable the multi-is authentication and go back to login and now you can see that when i log in i need to choose the library if i'm using i'll just log into the email one library with with my credentials and now i can go to my account and see all of the data that i have here now you can see that i've actually logged in before and i have two library cards and i can choose which one to use and which one to get the information from so when i change the library card to demo 2 i get different information from the second ios switching back uh well they look pretty much the same but it's not the same and it's the same record so it's easy to get to get confused here let's see what we have for holes no holes for this one no holes for this one either since the dimmer driver kind of randomly creates this data it can look pretty similar but it's not quite the same at least for this small data set anyway going to library cards i now see that i have two cards here i can remove either one i can add a new one i can again choose i can give it a name again something and now i have three different cars now i can go here and choose which one whichever i want and now again i have two cars connected to demo2 library that's also possible you can have multiple cards with a single library as well so library cards can be useful also when connected to single library but smaller back end it becomes even more useful when you connect to several libraries so that's all uh for for the simple setup of course uh when things get more complicated you will have some analysis that don't support logging in let's say that only demo one allows logging in if i go back here i still have these library cards connected to demo two but if i i now delete them and then the new one i can only choose demo one so it's not possible to to choose demo 2 anymore same goes when you log out and go to login it's not offering demo 2 anymore uh there are some upcoming changes to multi-back-end to make it more the driver itself more simple and also ready to use some uh for any any future functionality also while i said that the whole fund itself doesn't need to know much about the multiback and being present there are some situations where it's a there is very important to for for to to for the for we'll find to convey some information about what's what's happening uh for instance when when you log in and uh and go to go to your account uh all the menu items displayed here depend on the on the functionality that the end provides so if if there are no storage uh retrieval requests uh available uh it it won't be shown here so in this regard uh the information about which account is enabled needs to be conveyed to multiback and so that it can ask whether it's uh supported by the by the correct ils other than that i think should be really smooth more smooth sailing here so to remember set up multi by kendall and i set up the different ini files for for the for the libraries for the actual analysis and uh remember that this is the same as the drive as the ini name so demo one has a demo dot demo one dot ini and also change the settings in config.ini properly so that the motherboard driver is used and remember to index the records using using a source prefix so that should be it hope you enjoy using multiback in driver thanks

videos/ils_drivers_2.txt · Last modified: 2023/03/30 16:32 by crhallberg