Patron Data from Evergreen

[ejk]

Connect to Evergreen and pull Patron Data into Drupal

[eby]

For ezproxy module it would be nice if with EG we can have easy drupal access to whether a card is truly valid: not expired, not blocked, etc.

[ejk]

After some testing and discussion, plan now is to try to do as much ILS interaction via Javascript within Drupal HTML elements. E.g. Checkouts / Holds / Fines will be divs on the user account page, which use the OpenSRF javascript functions to talk directly to Evergreen from the user's browser. Similarly Request buttons on the Catalog results pages will be direct calls to Evergreen, bypassing Drupal.

[eby]

We'll have to play around and discuss abstraction methods. The main thing:

• Evergreen wasn't going to be exposed to the outside world. It will likely be fire-walled off to the staff vlan and specific servers that need to talk to it. This avoids excess load from crawlers and everything else. It also gives us some wiggle room on testing security updates when they come out.

Some requirements:

• Patron can only connect to their own account or accounts that they have been authorized to manage
• Staff can do actions for specific accounts without jumping over to the staff client. This will start with requests but would probably be good if they could do more things when looking at an account later on.

Some options:

• Drupal takes the action and sends it to the opensrf gateway. Contains everything but adds some bootstrap overhead to every call.
• Use the API project. This was going to allow patrons to interact with checkouts and other stuff anyways. Just need to make sure everything is stuff we want to expose. We'll also need to think about authentication but we need to do that anyways. The passport module gives lots of options. We could have the adding authentication be the adding LCard process. https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/passport
• Some evergreen end point that is specific to api vs the http gateway so that only certain calls are exposed and things can be authenticated in a way that integrates with drupal without lots of syncing. I'm not sure EG peeps are interested as most presume their patron database is being used for authentication. I'm not sure we want to deal with drupal authenticating with/off/syncing EG.