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====== 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 [[https://vufind.org/video/Ils2.mp4|mp4 download]] or through [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YlrzKdO4ag|YouTube]].


===== Related Resources =====

  - [[https://vufind.org/video/Ils2_MultiBackend.pptx|PowerPoint Slides]]
  - [[configuration:ils:multibackend_driver|MultiBackend Driver Documentation]]

===== 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