Receipt Printer App Email Capable


I've had a commented-out sub-routine in my library's receipt printer code that can email the receipt rather than print it for some time now. It required me to use Horizon's table editor to modify our receipt slip to include the patron email address. But now, with our push to go green and cut costs, I've done further testing on it, and it looks good to go.

The logic is pretty basic. If an email address exists for the patron, the program generates an email with the formatted data and sends it off piggy-backing on the consortium's mail server. No receipt gets printed. It looks like the 3M self-checkout stations we have do essentially the same thing, so I think it's kosher. The staff member at the circ desk gets feedback two ways: I added a "beep" line, and I write to the console window that the email was sent and where. What's really nice is that the emailed receipts are perfectly formatted for my iPhone. I didn't have to tweak anything.

If the mail gets sent, but the address is bad, we get the bounceback through our normal channels, which is great. I'm now just putting a little "try" loopback that will print out a receipt for email users only in the case that the mail server is unavailable. I think that patrons who sign up for email notification services will really like it. I'm just waiting for final approval from the consortium's mail server administrators.

Knowing this is possible, it was very disheartening to discover that there isn't yet any way to get isbns out. Horizon's kind of clunky when it comes to customizations like that. For now, I think the only bib record info that can come out to the checkout receipt is the title. It's too bad, because once the isbns can come out, a lot of nice apps could use that data, e.g., LibraryThing, Delicious Library, etc.

Posted: Wed - March 19, 2008 at 09:27 AM      

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