Patron Authentication Scope Customisation

[Mike C <smith dot not dot western at gmail dot com>]

Hi,

Has anyone had any experience with customising a login/patron record
display screen for just a single scope? i.e. to make it display more
information than a usual login (perhaps include birthdate when we
otherwise wouldn't).

>From what I can see, to configure what is displayed on the page you
need to configure WWWOptions, which is global, correct? In particular,
I also want to display the patron record number.

The reason I want to do this is to scrape the information for use on
the libraries www website. I know I can use the Patron API for this as
well, however I'm trying to integrate the logins... when I use the
Patron API I can't set a Innopac cookie to let the OPAC know the
person is logged in.

In the previous catalogue system, we had a custom login page which put
all the details we needed into an HTML form, which via javascript was
then posted back to the www, to complete the integrated login.

So at the end of the day I'd like to be able to do something like the
following when the user submits to the innopac login page:

<form action="blah">
<input type="hidden" name="patronId" value="p123...." />
<input type="hidden" name="fullname" vaule="John Smith" />
etc...
</form>

This form, generated on the OPAC, would then auto-submit back to the
www server, to complete the login.

Does anyone think customisation this is possible? Or am I barking up
the wrong tree? Has anyone else had any experience in implementing an
integrated login like this?

My other option (which looks more and more likely) is to double-up
what I do and have the user submit his login details to the www
server, which then via a CGI script obtains the Patron details, and
then forwards the user onto the Catalogue. This solution seems to work
well, except the user is then stuck in the catalogue instead of
returning to the www server which is what currently happens.

To give you an idea of what we do at the moment, look at this two
images. Pre-login:
http://www.shorelibraries.govt.nz/About/images/homepage-pre-login.png
Post-login: http://www.shorelibraries.govt.nz/About/images/homepage-post-login.png

Cheers,

Mike Copley
Website Development
North Shore Libraries
http://www.shorelibraries.govt.nz/