# Language String IDs for Notification Selections
**URL:** https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973
**Category:** Polaris
**Tags:** language-editor
**Created:** [June 25, 2026, 3:31pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973 "2026-06-25T15:31:00Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Phil\_Agnew](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/Phil_Agnew)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 3:31pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/1 "2026-06-25T15:31:00Z")
We don’t have an automated phone service for hold notifications, so we ended up using one of our UDFs to indicate which patrons need to be called for holds. This works out fine, but I keep finding staff that select “Phone 1” as the notification option instead of our “Call for holds?” UDF (or both, so from reason). I don’t believe there’s anyway to disable any of the notification options outright, so I wanted to change the language string for the dropdown menu to say something like “DO NOT USE” for those phone entries… but I’m having issues locating the Language String ID… Does anyone have an idea of where this might be?
I did notice the numeric iterations appear to be suffixes for some of the field labels, so that might be clouding things a little…
Or if anyone has other suggestions for dealing with entry values you don’t want to be used, I’d be happy to hear those too!
Thanks!
Phil A
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### Author:  [@wesochuck](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/wesochuck)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 3:46pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/2 "2026-06-25T15:46:06Z")
> [@Phil\_Agnew](#):
>
> so we ended up using one of our UDFs to indicate which patrons need to be called for holds.
Not to go on too far of a tangent, but I didn’t think using the Phone Notification option in the patron record **required** you to use an automated phone call system. In fact, I thought that was the purpose of [the Hold Call Slip](https://documentation.iii.com/polaris/8.0/Default.htm#PolarisStaffHelp/Patron_Services_Admin/PDPreceipts/Enable_hold_call_slips.htm).
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### Author:  [@Phil\_Agnew](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/Phil_Agnew)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 4:00pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/3 "2026-06-25T16:00:19Z")
I would have **loved** to use the Hold Call Slip… but it printed out **every available hold** for a patron’s account **every time** a hold was made available… which for someone who requested 25+ picture books gets to be an inconvenience and a waste of paper… even if receipt paper is only ~$0.30 per roll… I’m not on team “reduce receipt length by 0.2” to save money!", but what we’re talking about here was egregious… I notated a bunch of receipt samples during our implementation and we just weren’t able to get what we wanted out of them… If anyone has ideas on how we could get a basic hold slip with pickup slip appended to it, separated by a partial tear, I’m all ears!
[Polaris Hold Receipt Samples.pdf](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/uploads/short-url/uCHW9nwaiw6YfmhWRcgdJYP8m0P.pdf) (127.0 KB)
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### Author:  [@Phil\_Agnew](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/Phil_Agnew)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 4:20pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/4 "2026-06-25T16:20:38Z")
I not sure, but it seems like there is also a chance items wouldn’t be billed or declared lost if patrons had their notification preference set to “Phone 1”, since the automated messaging isn’t set up/delivered…
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### Author:  [@wesochuck](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/wesochuck)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 8:08pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/5 "2026-06-25T20:08:05Z")
Good points.
I _think_ the way our members handle these situations is by putting three dashes `---` in the last name so they become more visible that way.
But, back to your original inquiry, I’m NOT suggesting you change these this way, but my guess is you’re not seeing them in the language editor because they come from a database table. `select * from polaris.polaris.SA_DeliveryOptions`
Changing those could break things in subtle ways or… everything might be OK.
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### Author:  [@Phil\_Agnew](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/Phil_Agnew)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 8:18pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/6 "2026-06-25T20:18:12Z")
Thanks for digging into that @wesochuck ! We’re SaaS Hosted, so I couldn’t change those database entries even if I wanted to… A shame (and slightly bewildering) that they’re not surfaced in the Language Editor… Oh, well… Thanks again!
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### Author:  [@wesochuck](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/wesochuck)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2026, 8:44pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/7 "2026-06-25T20:44:07Z")
> [@Phil\_Agnew](#):
>
> A shame (and slightly bewildering) that they’re not surfaced in the Language Editor
My guess is that is because they’ve been there for 25+ years, and refactoring into language strings would be a messy process.
Not saying it is impossible or they won’t do it; in fact, I _think_ they’re doing more internalization in 8.1, but it is probably a delicate area of the system. So, if you have already double checking with a support ticket, it is probably a good idea.
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### Author:  [@eolmstead](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/eolmstead)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2026, 2:34pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/8 "2026-07-06T14:34:26Z")
Hi @Phil, we had a similar issue to you and were also told that the strings are not available in the language editor _individually_. We were in a position where we had one old phone notification system that required phone numbers to be formatted one way and one old email-to-SMS notification system that required a different format. We wrote stored procedures to correctly reformat anything in the Phone 1 field for phone calls and anything in Phone 3 for text messaging, and tried to train staff to use Phone 1 for phone calls and Phone 3 for text messaging. We wanted to rename Phone 3 “Text Messaging Phone” to make it easier for staff to remember. When I couldn’t find the language string, I opened a Support ticket and they told me that there is a language string for the term “phone” that appears in Phone 1, Phone 2, and Phone 3, but no separate language strings for each option in the dropdown menu.
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### Author:  [@Phil\_Agnew](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/Phil_Agnew)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2026, 3:46pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/9 "2026-07-06T15:46:57Z")
Hey, @eolmstead !
That tracks with what I was seeing as I dug into the language strings… I found some “Phone” strings that were clearly being appended with a number to create the three notification options, but I still haven’t been able to effectively alter the notification dropdown on our Training server… Fortunately, I don’t have to juggle the need for unique texts for each of our phone fields (my condolences for your situation though…) so long as the string changes would only affect the notification option dropdown for staff… However I’m still having trouble identifying the shared string:
This is still a pretty odd design choice, unless they thought they were going to support the addition of additional phone numbers in the same way we add additional addresses… but even then, the Text Messaging language strings suggest they pivoted away from that idea… Anyway, I found one more string in the Polaris Database stings that I’m trying out… if it does work, it seems like it’s going to be an overnight thing, but I’m skeptical…
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### Author:  [@wesochuck](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/u/wesochuck)
#### Post date: [September 24, 2026, 4:30pm UTC](https://forum.innovativeusers.org/t/language-string-ids-for-notification-selections/2973/10 "2026-09-24T16:30:12Z")
@Phil_Agnew and others. One of the product managers reached out to me (they can view but can’t post here) and wanted me to share the following update:
> we have fixed the overlooked Notification Option drop down values in 8.2 you will have language strings you can customize **after** upgrading to 8.2
Furthermore, their intent is that all Leap strings _should_ are intended to be customizable/localized:
> We’re in the “whack-a-mole” era for missing language strings in Leap. We _think_ we’ve got them all…
If you find others after 8.2 make sure to report them via a support ticket.