Attendance Monitoring Woes

[Jhongski]

I'm planning to create an attendance monitoring system, assuming my client bought the swipe barcode scanner already:

1. What are the next steps that I need in order to integrate that barcode to my VB app? Do I need additional OCX/DLL to read the barcode?

2. How will I know which symbology to use - they are using the alpha numeric format so from what I've read in the past posts I need to use Code 39.

3. As much as possible I want my application to support barcode and the normal keyboard entries so that they could do it either way when entering their employee ID, is it possible?

 

[DougP]

How you read a barcode depends on the interface to the PC.
most common:
USB (emulates Keyboard and is plug and play)
Keyboard (plugs into keyboard)
Serial (Must write something to read serial port and decipher data sent

all will answer YES to question 3

USB and Keyboard must have the cursor blinking in the correct box at time of scan Ie Employee ID box. This is by far the easist. just make sure after they scan that the cursor is setting back in the correct box.
If they open Notepad and leave it open and active and expect to log in, and your program is setting behind it, it's not going to see the scan.
Serial see's everything but you will spend a lot of time writting Serial port commnucations. And the scaner may send junk you have to strip off #%^12345~

DougP, MCP, A+