TimeFormat System Preference & Koha

by Barton Chittenden on Oct 2, 2014

Oh the Humanity!

(Please don’t change the TimeFormat system preference in Koha)

Background

The system preference ‘TimeFormat’ was added to Koha in version 3.14. This had a side effect of changing the way that the ‘description’ field in the fines table is formatted, which leads to duplicate fines.

Why this is bad

I can’t fix this. I’m working on it, but I don’t have a solution right now — it’s a fix that I’ve spent weeks on, and that will probably require a lot of time working with individual libraries cleaning up edge cases… I will be spending hours on the phone with any given library, making decisions about how to fix individual fines, one-by-one.

So please … for the sake of my sanity, and all that is good and right in the world, don’t touch the TimeFormat system preference.

How this affects you

If it’s set to 24 Hour format, keep it that way. If it’s set to 12 hour, that’s fine. Don’t touch it. If you touch it, you will create hours of headaches for your Circ staff, and I won’t be able to help you quickly. The only fast solution is to delete all of your fines.

Changing the TimeFormat system preference is bad for everybody. Don’t touch it. You have been warned.