Add Optional "Fuzzy" Barcode Lookup and Item Disambiguation to Requests App

Current situation or problem:

Under some circumstances, items in FOLIO inventory may share a barcode, but FOLIO requires all item barcodes to be unique. One potential remedy in these situations is to add a suffix to the barcodes to make them unique WITHOUT updating the physical barcodes on the item. Another situation may arise when handling items from outside the local FOLIO inventory (eg. ILL, INN-Reach integration, etc.). We need a mechanism to disambiguate items under these circumstances when presented with an unaltered barcode.

In scope

• Alternative workflow in ui-requests that performs a right-truncated wildcard search for an item by the entered barcode and presents a disambiguation UI
• Settings to enable/disable (and possibly configure certain criteria for) this functionality

Out of scope

• Similar functionality in ui-checkin

Use case(s)

• Multiple libraries hosted in one FOLIO tenant that have duplicated barcodes in their physical collections and wish to utilize suffixes to distinguish items without altering their physical barcodes and be able to distinguish them when performing creating requests
• Circulating items borrowed from other institutions (ILL or INN-Reach) where you do not control the barcodes and duplication is a possibility for which you need to account

Proposed solution/stories

To avoid inadvertently transacting with the incorrect item, it should be possible to perform a "fuzzy" or wildcard match on the entered barcode before populating item information in the request creation form. If more than one matching item record is returned, then a modal should be presented with a list of items (similar to the "move request" modal in ui-requests) to choose from. When an item is selected, that item's information should be used to populate the request transaction.

Links to additional info

Questions