Analysis: Direct holdings & item search
Epic | |
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Trillium | |
Umbrellaleaf |
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Future |
Feature pages
Overview
In the initial iteration of Inventory, search was began as Instance-centric. This means that results returned in all tabs - Instance, Holdings, Items - are the Instance record and exploring the holdings/items of a particular instance requires navigating through the Instance record. Building upon the current state, there are multiple use cases we need to support, including the general ability to search directly on holdings and items. Some of the current pain points include:
Difficulty identifying a specific holdings or item in an Instance, especially when there are large numbers of each record. For example, users have to search the Instances, which will return the items in the Instance detail view and users have to page through the list of items. If there are hundreds or even thousands of items, this becomes very cumbersome and challenging
In ECS, often the user is searching within the context of their own tenant; they want to find specific items that they hold, such as if any items have a status of “Missing”; currently, search will return all instances that have holdings from my tenant and/or any item with a status of “Missing”
In ECS, currently can’t reliably open the item record from an exact match search (such as by barcode)
Inability to produce a list of relevant items and export the corresponding UUIDs
Inadequate cross-app item look-up component
MM SIG gathered the following use cases in 2025: Use cases for searching on holdings and items in Inventory
Originally, we investigated whether implementing nested objects was the most feasible option to support these use cases (see https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/UXPROD-4906 ) . However, the results of that spike found that a potential alternative to create separate indexes for holdings and items.
Currently, the solution for separate indexes for holdings and items is being investigated in https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/ARCH-326 .
Themes
The major areas of improvement are:
Record-specific results sets and record-specific routing
Creating a cross-app component - especially for searching items in other applications
Improving the usability of item and holdings navigation
Supporting cross-record queries and more complex facet logic