caltechlibrary/boffo

Boffo is an add-on for Google Sheets written by the Caltech Library. It lets you select item barcodes in a spreadsheet and retrieve information about the item records from a FOLIO server.

Boffo

Boffo (Barcodes from FOLIO) is a Google Sheet script for getting data about FOLIO items.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Quick start
• Usage
• Known issues and limitations
• Getting help
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgments

Introduction

Boffo (a loose acronym of Barcodes from FOLIO, and pronounced like the noun) is an add-on for Google Sheets. Among other things, it lets you select item barcodes in a spreadsheet and retrieve information about the item records from a FOLIO server.

Installation

If you're Caltech Library staff, Boffo is available to you from the Google Marketplace for add-ons as an "Internal" add-on; if you're not Caltech Library staff, you can still install Boffo using alternate methods, as described in the pages linked below:

• Installation instructions for Caltech Library staff
• Installation instructions for others

Quick start

Once installed as an Add-on on a Google Sheet, Boffo will present itself as a menu item in the Extensions menu across the top of the sheet. Selecting the Boffo item in the Extensions menu will present several items in a submenu:

Boffo's main function is Look up barcodes in FOLIO and its use is very simple:

1. Select some item barcodes in your Google spreadsheet
2. Pull down the Extensions menu
3. Select Look up barcodes in FOLIO from the Boffo menu

Boffo will create a new sheet titled "Item Data" in the spreadsheet where you ran it, then add the results of the item lookups to the new sheet.

If this is the first time you've used Boffo, it will first request your FOLIO account login and password in order to ask FOLIO for a token to use the network services. Boffo will store that token (and not your login or password), then proceed to look up the items whose barcodes are highlighted in the sheet. On subsequent invocations, Boffo will not ask you for FOLIO credentials unless something happens to make the token invalid (in which case, Boffo will ask you for the credentials again and generate a new token).

Usage

Please see the detailed usage section in the Boffo documentation for more information about Boffo's features and how to use them.

Known issues and limitations

Depending on your account type, Boffo will run into Google quotas limiting maximum execution time. For G Suite users such as the Caltech Library, this limit is 30 minutes. For non-G Suite users, the limit is 6 minutes. At the time of this writing, Boffo can retrieve item records at a rate of about 70–100 records/second, so the 6 minute time limit will limit non-G suite users to looking up somewhere between 25,000–35,000 item records at a time.

Getting help

If you find an issue, please submit it in the GitHub issue tracker for this repository.

Contributing

Your help and participation in enhancing Boffo is welcome! Please visit the guidelines for contributing for some tips on getting started.

License

Software produced by the Caltech Library is Copyright © 2024 California Institute of Technology. This software is freely distributed under a BSD-style license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.

Acknowledgments

The vector artwork used as a starting point for the logo for this project was created by Sunarto Hamizan It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The vector graphics was modified by Mike Hucka to change the color.

The spinner used in some HTML dialogs shown by Boffo came from SVG Spinners (CSS & SMIL) by Utkarsh Verma. The code was copied on 2023-08-01 and is licensed under the MIT license by the author.

This work was funded by the California Institute of Technology Library.

boffo's Issues

Add a progress bar dialog with a cancel button

Currently, you can't cancel an ongoing lookup. You can only stop it by refreshing the browser page, but that's not obvious. Better would be to have a typical progress bar dialog and add a cancel button that the user could click to stop things deliberately.

Fetch multiple barcodes at once

Turns out it's possible to look up multiple barcodes in one API call. Use OR in the CQL query, and make sure to encode the spaces. Roughly like this:

OKAPI-URL/inventory/items?query=barcode=12345%20OR%20barcode=45678

Also watch out for the maximum length of the URL.

Add function to look up by call numbers

The library staff would like a way to get the records for items that span a range of call numbers. My current thinking is that it would work roughly like this:

1. user selects a range of cells in the spreadsheet containing barcodes
2. Boffo looks up all the items
3. Boffo determines which call numbers are the bounds of the range of call numbers covered by the selected cells
4. Boffo does a Folio lookup based on wildcarding the call numbers, somehow

Invalid URLs in Markdown files

Errors in README.md

• [400] https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/boffo/830370816631 – Failed: Network error: Bad Request
• [404] https://github.com/caltechlibrary/boffo/LICENSE – Failed: Network error: Not Found

This content was produced by a GitHub Action.

Detect if user clicks "x" to close dialogs

If the user clicks "x" in the upper right-hand corner in a dialog like the folio credentials dialog, Boffo does not detect it and doesn't do the right thing for canceling the process.

Use fetchAll to speed up Folio data requests

GAS has fetchAll, which may help speed up data fetches from Folio by doing them in batches.

Add tests

This code doesn't have any tests. I need to figure out how to do unit testing in JS.

Adjust selection filter to allow alpha-only barcodes

Boffo as of version 1.6.0 filters the user's spreadsheet selection in the command for looking up barcodes. It filters out anything that doesn't have at least one digit. The only purpose of this particular filter is that I wanted to guard against the user selecting a whole column with a title. If they have a spreadsheet like

Our Barcodes
────────
0930950
0930951
0930952
...

etc., and they select the whole column instead of selecting just the cells containing barcodes, I wanted to filter out the text "Our Barcodes" (or whatever they might have written in the header row) because in the output, Boffo creates a new sheet where the first column has a title (and the title is "Barcodes").

In a conversation with Kyle Banerjee on the code4lib Slack on 2023-09-01, I learned that some other sites do have barcodes that have no digits in them. This would be a problem for Boffo, which would ignore those barcodes completely.

I'm not sure what the solution is going to be. Maybe there needs to be a user preference setting that allows them to say "allow anything" or something like that.

Provide a way to choose which fields are added to spreadsheet

Currently, the set of Folio record fields written to columns is hardwired. It would be nice for users to be able to select which ones they want.