Check-in (has reservation been claimed?)
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#99 Check-in (has reservation been claimed?)
Due to Corona we have to keep a log of people's visits to the building (an academic library).
People might have a (MRBS-)reservation or they might only visit for a very short time to fetch or return something. In either case they currently scan the barcode of their membership card which gets logged along with timestamp in a textfile.
After already using the barcode as login name for MRBS (see #98) another idea sprung up.
Another table mrbs_checkin has been added to the the database. Now anyone can claim a reservation 10 minutes before or up to 30 minutes after the starting time and gets saved into that table. That log entry will not be deleted even if the reservation itself would be deleted afterwards. Not yet implented is a cronjob to delete log entries being older than whatever the authorities require for keeping the information (currently 14 days).
(Probably less interesting in the context of MRBS: by verifying the validity of the scanned barcode somewhere else, people without reservations also get logged).
Another benefit of the check-in process is that unclaimed reservations can be released by deleting them if no reference in mrbs_checkin is found. This is also not yet implented but might be done with another cronjob, running maybe about every 10 minutes.
Maybe it is a very special scenario, but maybe not. As a thought: anyone not having memebership cards with barcodes might think about sending confirmation emails with a code (barcode, qr code...) that can be scanned from mobile device displays. Anyway, if anyone is interested in the current state of the solution it can be found here: https://collaborating.tuhh.de/tub/dd/applications/mrbs/-/commit/9039ae68e7ef7ce68f69afb6711c2784966ce08a (it's just in a ~"proof of concept stage" and a bit messy ;))
In between it's running and working fine so far. A very short description is at https://collaborating.tuhh.de/tub/dd/applications/mrbs. You only need the config vars and the content of the addons folder in https://collaborating.tuhh.de/tub/dd/applications/mrbs/-/tree/master/web/
It should be easy to modify it to (for example) show a user specific barcode in view_entry.php which could be scanned from a mobile's screen.
Last edit: Tobias Zeumer 2020-09-08