Complete Barcode Scanning & Generation in FileMaker

[FileMaker Magazine]

There's nothing more fraught with errors than allowing a human to enter a long string of digits. Some people are detail oriented and others less so. Who cares if you transpose the seven and zero right? Well, we developers care, that's who. We need things to be user-friendly, fast and exact. That's what you get with barcodes.

Try imagining our modern world without them. It just wouldn't be the same. So, why aren't you using them whenever and wherever you can within FileMaker. Put a barcode on everything. Add them to your documents and scan them to load a specific record. Put them on your assets, add them to your employee badges, go crazy.

While FileMaker offers the very convenient Insert from Device script step for scanning barcodes within FileMaker Go, there's no native implementation for creating barcodes. Over the years, many developers have solved the issue of barcodes in many different ways. You can find plug-ins, simple fonts, FileMaker add-ons (which can be frustrating to modify) and straight-up Custom Functions which will create a barcode. By far, the most straight-forward implementation is going to be the easiest to manage and maintain and, in my opinion, that's using a simple JavaScript library which will create the most optimized format possible - an SVG. That's what this video addresses. The cleanest implementation I can think of. It's both portable and minimalistic. Need to create barcodes? You'll learn all the details in this video.

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