Library Web Chic

Why databases-driven applications rock

It seems I've had another troubleshooting week. I didn't create
anything new last week but fixed a whole bunch of problems. One problem
I had to deal with was a bug in the 6.5 version of the ILLiad
interlibrary loan software which allows you to enter invoice
information in the client but not view it. OCLC support knew about the
problem but said it wasn't scheduled to be fixed until version 7 of
ILLiad. This is annoying but not all that problematic. The reason is
that ILLiad is driven by a database and if you know anything about
databases and webscripting you know that creating a webpage to retrieve
this information is very easy. So 20 minutes of coding work and the
problem was solved.

For me this the beauty of database-driven applications. If the
application doesn't do what you want or it is broken you can pull the
data yourself. We've done this on a number of occasions with ILLiad
because how we were doing things didn't mesh with the application. A
few I can think of off the top of my head.

• Wrote a page for users to request their password hint to be emailed to them from ILLiad
• Wrote reports for how many articles with had sent via Ariel and how many articles we have received via Ariel

Currently I am working on a way to create an integrated “My Account”
page for our users which shows of all the items they have checked out
both from Interlibrary Loan and the library's regular collection. This
wouldn't be possible if ILLiad wasn't driven by a database. The moral
of the story is the more you know about databases and database-driven
web pages the more you can extend your existing applications to suit
your needs.