Designing CML Checkout Requests

The user needs to be able to electronically submit a request to check out a title. The Submitting a Checkout Request topic describes the way the designers envision the user interface should work.

The Corporate Media Library (CML) application performs the following steps to add a checkout request to the CML database:

  1. Display the CML home page.
  2. Display the Library Search page and search the library database according to the user's search criteria. A list of titles resulting from the search appears in the browser. The user can sort the list by title, publish date, or media type.
  3. Display detailed information about the title.
  4. Display the Submit Request page.
  5. Submit the request.
  6. Acknowledge receipt of request. If no copies are available display the user's place on the waiting list and the number of copies of the title available for checkout.
  7. Verify that the user is an F & M employee. The user's Windows NTŪ logon information is captured and used to look up the employee's account in the F & M Corporation's Exchange Server directory. If the account is not found the user is not valid.
  8. Add or modify borrower information. If this is the first time the employee has submitted a request, a record for this employee is added to the database table that contains borrower data. An existing borrower's record is updated. Additional data items such as a person's title and department are copied from the Exchange Server directory to the SQL Server database table. The CML application does not use this information, but availability of the data will support interesting queries on the usage of the F & M library in the future.