Fix Alma ILS driver to get status only for numeric record IDs

[stweil]

No description provided.

[EreMaijala]

Alma's REST API defines the mms_id as a string. Even if the identifiers currently contain only numbers, it'd be dangerous to assume that's always going to be the case.

[stweil]

Nevertheless the Alma REST API throws an error like "Input parameters mmsId MADOC71291 is not numeric" if it gets a non-numeric mmsId.

It looks like all records which were imported as MARC21 are handled by the Alma ILS driver. Without this patch, I cannot import records from our EPrints OAI-PMH with format marc21, but have to use the format oai_dc which gives less information (https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/cgi/oai2?verb=ListMetadataFormats). When I import marc21, the search results show errors, and an individual search results claims that the ILS is not operational because the Alma ILS driver throws an exception.

What would you suggest to handle this? Ideally MARC21 records which were not imported from Alma should not trigger an Alma status query later. Refusing such queries in the Alma driver is only the 2nd best solution, but I think it is a valid solution: if Ex Libris had plans to introduce non-numeric mmsIds, the error message would simply say that an ID like MADOC71291 is unknown.

[stweil]

See also the official documentation which describes the mms_id.

[EreMaijala]

@stweil As far as I can see, the documentation you linked to just describes the current structure. And while Alma may internally limit the format of the IDs, the API does not. See e.g.

• https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/apis/docs/bibs/R0VUIC9hbG1hd3MvdjEvYmlicy97bW1zX2lkfQ==/#urlParameters
• https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/apis/docs/xsd/rest_bib.xsd/?tags=GET#bib

Let's use the related Slack thread to discuss further options.