It is possible to create Aeon web pages that are specifically intended only for certain patron types. This allows you to give certain customer groups, based on patron type, specific request options or information on those type-specific pages that other customer groups will not be able to see or use. These special versions of the Aeon web pages might contain additional information or they could contain significant functional differences, such as additional request buttons for specific types of requests that others neither know about nor have access to.
For example, if you wanted to set up the Music Score Request Form to be accessible ONLY to Faculty customers, you could create a new Faculty version of the Main Menu page containing that special request button. The Aeon DLL would then route customers to the correct Main Menu Page based on their assigned patron types. This new Faculty-specific Main Menu page would display only for users with the "Faculty" patron type. Other patron types would see the default version of the Main Menu page without that additional special request option.
Setting up the Pages
Creating the Patron Type Specific Page
To create the Faculty-specific Music Score Request Form example mentioned above, save a copy of the default Aeon web page that are going to be displayed differently based on patron type, in this case, MainMenu.html, and rename it with a patron type suffix in the following format:
AeonWebPageName-PatronType.html
So for the Faculty-specific Music Score Request Form example, you would copy the existing MainMenu.html page and save it as MainMenu-Faculty.html.
The hyphen between the page name and the patron type is important. For multi-word patron types separated by spaces, like "Graduate Assistant", the suffix would be "-Graduate_Assistant.html", with the hyphen in front and any spaces in the patron type replaced by underscores (_).
Edit the newly created Patron Type-Specific Page
Once you have the new page saved with the correct patron type extension, edit the web pages to reflect the changes you want to make for that particular patron type. In our example, you would also need to edit the Include_Menu.html to reflect the addition of the Faculty-only addition of the Music Score Request Form. Save this form with a new name such as Include_Menu-Faculty.html.
For example, if a status-specific version of include_menu.html should be available for users with a status of "Remote Researcher", the status-specific version would be include_menu-Remote_Researcher.html.
Note that spaces in the status are replaced with underscores, the same as with other pages. If a status-specific version of the include file is not found, Aeon will revert to the standard include file.
The web pages that want to use include files do not need to be modified since the checking/loading will happen automatically.
e.g. If a page (MainMenu.html) had the following include tag, it would automatically look for include_menu-Remote_Researcher.html if the logged in user had a status of "Remote Researcher".
<#INCLUDE filename="include_menu.html">.
You will also need to create the new request pages for your new request type, for example, GenericRequestMusicScore.html and EditGenericRequestMusicScore.html as described above in Creating New Request Forms.
Customer Use of the Patron Status specific Pages
When customers access the web pages, the Aeon DLL looks at the patron type assigned to the customer and determines which of the pages to display. In the example for Faculty users, the Aeon DLL displays AeonMainMenu-Faculty.html. For all other users, the DLL displays AeonMainMenu.html. This would work the same way for any other patron type-specific pages. Each time it accesses ANY Aeon Borrowing web page, the Aeon DLL looks for a -PatronType version of that same page to display. You can have as many or as few patron type-specific pages as needed.
Possible Uses/Enhancements of this Feature
In addition to allowing certain requests types to be used only by certain users, there are several other possible uses and enhancements for this feature. These might include:
- Adding custom queues and routing rules to expedite certain request types through processing.
- Adding Billing information to the request pages in order to offer different service levels, billable at different rates (or free to certain patron types).
- Using Patron-type-specific versions of the Add Billing Accounts page to require SOME customers to register a Billing Account, but not others. This is especially useful if you bill certain patron types for services, but not others.