Reports Permission in Koha

by Nicole C. on Aug 5, 2013

A short while ago we got the following anonymous message via our contact form on the ByWater website:

By allowing people to block which staff members are allowed to write reports you are limiting the customer service of your product. Please discuss this with anybody you sell your product to in the future.

Since we didn’t have an email address to reply to I thought I would address this comment for all of our readers and hopefully reach the person who left the message for us.

The short answer is that this sounds like a setting that this library’s administrators have turned on. Koha can allow or not allow people to create reports based on their permission level. This is actually a desired feature that was asked for by a library using the system years ago (no feature like this makes it in to Koha without a library asking for it). When I demo Koha I do talk about the fact that there are many permission levels that can be set to control who on your staff accesses what – but I obviously can’t go through every single permission level in the short time that a demo takes.

As someone who has written reports that have required a complete restart of MySQL (typos, missing commas, etc etc) I have to agree that limiting the ability to write reports to those who are MySQL experts sounds like a wise way to prevent your system from needing a restart. On that note though, here at ByWater we’ll write any report asked for for our partners and then we share them publicly on the Koha Reports Library page, so if you don’t have the necessary permissions you can ask us or the Koha community to work out the report you need.

So if you’re a Koha system manager you might want to explain to your staff why you have removed/added certain permissions to specific staff members. If you didn’t know that you could control this permission level please check the patron permissions and specifically the report permissions sections in the manual.

I hope that this helps our anonymous commenter and some of the rest of you out there.