2020-07-29 Meeting notes

Marcia outlined the range of needs, themes from stakeholders, and primary spheres of documentation.  She provided her slide deck.  She would appreciate some input from those of us who are interested and able to devote time and attention when she needs to loop back to us.

The bulk user loader module was sidelined a while ago, and needs to be updated.  For instance, there are new required fields that the old user loader doesn't look for.  It also uses UUID as the unique identifier, which in many cases is not predictable.  Ian has, in one project, used the patron barcode as part of the user's UUID to make it more predictable.

The inventory module has a bulk API feature called "Upsert."  Perhaps this bulk API can be leveraged to work with the users module.  The problem here is that in one of Ian's projects, he used Tags to identify Library staff, and Upsert wipes out all tags, which makes it harder to find them again.  A possible solution is to download the user data, merge it with new data, and then upload the new user data.  Ian believes that Postgres can't update individual json fields like SQL can.  Brooks is not so sure.

Brooks has noticed that the user-loading documentation has changed, and appears not to be representative of functionality.  Patty asked who handles that module, and nobody on the call could say.  This is a weak spot.  Patty will find out who wrote those docs and get some answers.