The 5-Minute Series: Setting default messaging preferences for SMS alerts.

The problem

Earlier in the day, my professional colleague and friend Joydeep Chanda asked a question. His Koha v3.22.10 installation (at Gurudas College Library) had turned on SMS alert service for its users. The library being a long time Koha user, presented a challenge. He had ~ 6000+ users, so now he and his staff had the unenviable task of having to update the smsalertnumber field in the borrowers table for these 6000+ users. I pointed him to a recent Facebook post by another friend Vimal Kumar Vazaphally. That solved part of his problem, but he still had to choose the default types of SMS messages to be delivered.

So, I pointed him to another post by Vimal – “Use of borrowers-force-messaging-defaults script“. But after a while he complained that while the borrowers-force-messaging-defaults script did set the SMS options, it also enabled *all* of them, he wanted SMS send option to be set only for CHECK-IN and CHECK-OUT.

Description of borrowers-force-messaging-defaults as included in its source:

If the EnhancedMessagingPreferences syspref is enabled after borrowers have been created in the DB, those borrowers won’t have messaging transport preferences default values as defined for their borrower category. So you would have to modify each borrower one by one if you would like to send them ‘Hold Filled’ notice for example.

This script create transport preferences for all existing borrowers and set them to default values defined for the category they belong to.

The solution

The answer lies in correctly assigning advanced messaging preferences by default to a patron category *and then* running the borrowers-force-messaging-defaults script. In order for the patron category edit page display the “Default messaging preferences for this patron category” sub-form, the system preference EnhancedMessagingPreferences needs to be enabled.

The Steps

1. Check if the EnhancedMessagingPreferences is enabled. If not, then enable it.
2. Go to Home -> Administration -> Patron categories and select the category to edit.
3. Scroll down the Modify category form to the “Default messaging preferences for this patron category” section.
4. Select the checkboxes against the SMSes you want to be sent by default for that category.
5. Save the changes
6. Go to a command line terminal and run the borrowers-force-messaging-defaults script. This will ensure that only the defaults are set.

Enjoy!

See also:

[1] “Koha and key lessons of using transactional SMS in India” by L2C2 Technologies

[2] Press release about setting up of SMS alert service at Gurudas College Library.

[3] SMS-Send-IN-Unicel-0.01 at CPAN