user in view

No I'm afraid not. Originally, patrons were not users, and I didn't have time to rewrite and add new view plugins when the new version was released.

If I understand you correctly, the following ugly hack with the php customfield should work:

$node=node_load($data->nid);
foreach ($node->items as $item) {
  $user=user_load($item[last_patron_uid]);
  print $user->name;
}

I'm interested in improving Views support but I'm not sure yet how to best do this. One option is to just provide specific fields like last user to check out, last transaction date, etc for a node.

The ideal solution would probably be an item specific view type, which would make the relationship between nodes and items in regards to transactions better.

Any thoughts on what is needed in practice by others?