I am needing to read a barcode from a wedge type scanner and caputure the data into a textbox to be processed. I am new to working with barcodes and scanners and can find very little information on the subject. Especiallly using c#.net. Any idea on books, training, or a solution would be appreciated.
When you say wedge, I'm assuming Keyboard wedge. My vague understanding of 9 out of 10 barcode scanners appear for all intents and purposes as Keyboards to the system. They worry about the barcode and spit out ASCII text in a lot of cases. Scan an item while you're in Notepad or Wordpad, you'll see the representation of the barcode turned back into something you and I can commonly read.
Thus, you can capture a string. Certain symbologies or barcode families have start and stop characters. Code 39 is nice and easy to start with because they always begin and end with an asterisk *. Therefore, you can acquire a string and look for the start and stop points. Then munch it up, concatenate it, process it as you require.
If Notepad or Wordpad looks weird or there are characters added to the beginning or end of your scanned barcode, then it's time to grab the manual for the scanner, because most modern scanners have the ability to add a character to help you or the POS device know what is going on. In my environment, an Interleaved 2 of 5 barcode is prefixed by an i. By entering a series of special programming barcodes supplied by your vendor in the manual, you can enable/disable these features to your liking. Carriage Return is also a big deal if you're trying to enter info and want your software to know when you're off to the next barcode acquisition.
You can enable or disable checksums too, etc. I guess you'd be better off telling everyone your long term goal, so that they can chime in with their experience. For example, Code 128 is a denser barcode and you see it for inventorying a lot. It's alphanumeric so you have a lot of flexibility there. Maybe this fits your requirement, maybe not.
I found that the Internet and some tinker time is a far superior approach to POS and barcode equipment than sitting down with a book. Just look at it as a keyboard, see what you want to process and go from there. I used Swish to make a pricechecker with some multimedia for our products. I just took the string and checked it against my database in PHP.
You could do that in VB or any other language. Just figure out what triggers you want to work with.
Good luck! Kevin
into a textbox to be processed. I am new to working with barcodes and scanners and
Any idea on books, training, or a solution would be appreciated.
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