Barcodes In Visual Basic

[jbl1167]

I am a programmer and not an expert on bar coding. I do have to write an application that reads barcodes of products and keep inventories. The problem is that the barcodes are from different symbologies. I would like to be able to scan the barcode and allow the system to recognize the barcode symboloy inmediately and just read the numeric values of the barcode. Do you have an idea how could I do this? Do you know where I can get a list of the different barcodes techologies and examples of their format?

Thank you

 

[mthakershi]

I use libraries from this company for scanning and reading barcodes from documents. See if you find a match.

http://informatik.com/products.html

Malay

 

[kss444]

Back when I work for a retail company we would just load the scanning program onto our machines plug a scanner to our serial port then used the instruction manual that had the bar codes in it to program the scanner with our desired bar code then from then on VB did the necessary programming.

 

[waytech2003]

The handheld barcode readers that I have used, were placed in series with the keyboard. I believe they are referred to as wedges. When scanning a barcode, the device determined what type code was being read and sent the results as keystrokes to the active program.

 

[Golom]

As others have said, bar code scanners may be wedge-attached or port-attached. If wedge attached then the input from the scanner appears as though it was typed from the keyboard. If port-attached then you will need to use an MSComm control to read from the COM port.

The scanner itself determines the barcode type that's being read and that's usually not something that you need to care about in your program. The scanner can (usually) be programmed to read only specific bar-code symbologies or a range of them. If you're really interested, most of the scanners available today can be programmed to return that information.

 

[SmokinWrek]

As the others have said, most (if not all) handheld scanners do the actual detection of symbology and just send back the data that is encoded in the barcode.

However, if you would like to learn more about the different symbologies and how to decode them, I highly recommend "The Bar Code Book" by Roger C. Palmer. Amazon

It can be hard to find sometimes, but in my experience, it is very thorough.


Kevin

 

[ProgramError]

There's also a nice web site too... a lot easier to find!

http://www.barcodefaq.com/

http://www.barcodefaq.com/BarcodeMatch/index.html

There's also a free 3 of 9 (code 39) font available out there too.
(put this in your fonts foder)

http://www.barcodesinc.com/free-barcode-font/

The scanner will return a sequence of letter as thought it were typed in to the keyboard into a textbox. All you then need to do is work on the data in the textbox.

Ian




Ian Mayor (UK)
Program Error
Programming is 1% coding, 50% error checking and 49% sweat as your application bombs out in front of the client.