Hold Groups Administration

There are several administrative elements described below which relate to the Hold Groups feature

A new Library Setting allows for hold placement times to be randomized among list members for fair distribution. It can be found at Administration → Local Administration → Library Settings Editor → Randomize group hold order. If unset this will default to TRUE.

New Action Triggers allow for Evergreen to generate email or SMS notifications to patrons when a new hold is placed through Hold Groups.

New tables in the database store the batch place hold events occurring on a particular Hold Group (action.batch_hold_event) and the relationship between the batch hold request and successfully placed holds (action.batch_hold_event_map).

A new staff permission for MANAGE_HOLD_GROUPS allows applicable users to place and cancel batch holds through Hold Groups.

A new user bucket type was created for this feature, adding a row in the container.user_bucket_type with a unique code value to segregate new Hold Group user buckets.

The Hold Group feature relies on the open-ils.circ.holds.create.batch API methods to facilitate the batch creation of holds. A new API method processes the Hold Group user bucket each time a staff user requests it, optionally randomize the hold request creation times, and create a hold request for a specified title for a Hold Group member that does not already have an active hold on that title.