Ability for staff to place a hold for any customer from the OPAC RFC

Placing a hold for a customer

In addition to giving employees the option of placing a hold for a customer from the Koha Intranet, it is desired to give employees the option of placing a hold for a customer from the OPAC.

Technical Notes

• When Koha detects that an employee is logged into Koha, an additional option of "Place a customer hold" will appear for each search result. When the employee clicks this link they will be taking to a screen similar to what they see when they currently click Place a hold, however, they will have the option to type in a customer barcode in the "For:" field.
• The "For:" field can also include an ajax auto-complete menu to allow the employee to quickly select the specific customer (exactly how the quick search works on the Koha staff side).
• A system preference for placing customer holds from the opac can be added for organizations that do not wish to have this feature.

Note that this changes some security considerations for patron data, since any protections built around the STAFF VirtualHost (IP lockdown, SSL, etc.) would be circumvented. It would not necessarily be feasible to apply the same requirements to OPAC traffic.