z2folio - the Z39.50-to-FOLIO gateway

Copyright (C) 2018-2020 The Open Library Foundation

This software is distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the file "LICENSE" for more information.

Introduction

z2folio is a Z39.50 server for FOLIO bibliographic and holdings data, supporting record retrieval in USMARC, OPAC, XML and JSON formats. The functionality is all provided by the Net::Z3950::FOLIO library, which is also part of this distribution. It is written in Perl, and follows standard Perl-module conventions.

Dependencies

Dependencies are defined in the module descriptor but since the FOLIO Z39.50 server is strictly a client to the rest of FOLIO it does not need to be installed as a part of FOLIO itself, and can run outside of a FOLIO installation provided it is pointing to an Okapi server with the following modules enabled:

• mod-graphql
• mod-inventory
• mod-inventory-storage
• mod-source-record-storage

Of these, the last three are fairly ubiquitous in FOLIO installations, but mod-graphql may need to be added.

The Okapi connection details (url, tenant, username, password) are defined in the configuration file or via environment variables: see Authentication below.

Installation

To install this module type the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

On some platforms (e.g. my MacBook running MacOS 10.13.6 with YAZ and libxml2 installed from Homebrew 1.8.4), installing the prerequisite SimpleServer with cpan install Net::Z3950::SimpleServer fails. I fixed it using:

C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/libxml2/2.9.4_3/include/libxml2 cpan install Net::Z3950::SimpleServer

Running

If you don't want to install, you can run directly from the development checkout as:

perl -I lib bin/z2folio -c etc/config -- -f etc/yazgfs.xml

Building and running from Docker

terminal1$ docker build -t zfolio .
terminal1$ docker run -it --rm -p9997:9997 -e OKAPI_PASSWORD=swordfish --name run-zfolio zfolio

terminal2$ yaz-client @:9997
Z> find @attr 1=4 a
Z> format opac
Z> show 1

Note: if running in Kubernetes, it may be useful to turn of session logging by adding the -v-session parameter to the arguments. For example, perl -I lib bin/z2folio -c etc/config -- -f etc/yazgfs.xml -v-session. Session logs can be quite noisy on Kubernetes due to tcp healthchecks.

Authentication

Whichever approach to running the server you prefer, the default configuration file specifies that the password used to authenticate onto the back-end FOLIO system must be specified in the FOLIO_PASSWORD environment variable. You can provide that however seems best to you -- e.g. injecting it into a Docker container with the -e name=value as above -- or indeed use a different configuration file that hardwires the credentials.

Access via SRU

Thanks to the magic of the protocol-polyglot YAZ GFS, the FOLIO Z39.50 server also serves the SRU (REST-like) and SRW (SOAP-based) protocols. For example, if running the server on your local host, you can use the following to obtain an XML-formatted OPAC record containing both bibliographic metadata in MARCXML format and holdings-and-item information such as might be used by an OPAC. Replace placeholder with the real database name (or tenant id).

http://localhost:9997/<dbname>?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=title=a&maximumRecords=1&recordSchema=opac

Additional information

Other documentation

• Capabilities of this Z39.50/SRU server
• The change-log for this module.
• The z2folio program.
• The underlying library.
• The configuration file format.
• Developer documentation about the source code
• Developer documentation about the release procedure
• Developer documentation about FOLIO's SRS system, which the Z-server uses to obtain MARC records.
• Developer documentation about the Z39.50 OPAC record format and the YAZ toolkit's XML equivalent.

Other modules are described, with further FOLIO Developer documentation at dev.folio.org

Issue tracker

See project ZF at the FOLIO issue tracker.