General Layout
The Circulations dialog has undergone years of design in order to ensure that as much functionality as possible is presented on a dialog that appears to be deceptively simple.
The dialog is divided into three main areas. The strip along the base of the dialog provides a tabbed panel providing configuration options for the three major functions of the Circulations package - circulations, reservations, and advanced bookings.
The two remaining areas comprise in turn, the top left and top right hand sides of the dialog. The left hand side provides a method of searching for and displaying an Reader, while the right provides the same functionality for an Item. Only once both a valid Reader and a valid Item are successfully displayed on the screen, a function can be correctly executed.
All three principle areas of the circulations dialog can be resized or even hidden entirely using the slider bars provided. The command buttons vary in caption depending upon which tabbed panel is currently selected.
OPAC Layout
'Issue & Return' represents the OPAC layout of the circulations functional area. While generally the same as the Circulations dialog, the rules section is accessible only by clicking the arrows in the top-left hand corner, and even then only if the front-end OPAC user also has managerial permissions to access the restriction overrides - such as a librarian or other authorised library-assistant.
The OPAC layout also has two additional command buttons - toggle switches allowing Auto-Issue and Auto-Return to be carried out simply by scanning a reader and item barcode combination.
