Design question...

[lonesomejubilee]

Hi everyone,

I wasn't sure where to put this post as it is partially scripting, barcode scanners, and the like. Here's the problem. I have a friend who works at a local hardware store who I am trying to convince to use FMP for his inventory. Currently he does the pencil-n-paper method of counting everything in the store when they have to do inventory.

He would like to use his store's laptop computer and a scanner gun (barcode) to walk around the store and "zap" the UPC code to inventory it.

I don't all that much experience with this sort of thing, but I was thinking... if the scanner acts basically as keyboard (input device) you'd have to make it so it works well with FMP. Now to make it efficient you'd want to make it so that you could just scan item after item after item without having to go back and forth to key in any information. Secondly, youd need to have it be able to scan multiple items in any order, but then tally them up when completed... then take that final number and put it into a table (dated) so you could use it to track information as well.

Like I said I don't have all that much experience with hardware integration but here's what I need help with:

(1) making a script so that you could use the scanning gun repeatedly without having to key in any info (i.e. you scan one item, then it would add a new record so you can scan the next item).

(2) after all scanning was complete you would then need some sort of calculation or summary to make it so it counted all those items of one kind.... but then take that final number into a completely different table to track the info.

Thanks a lot... Vandy

[BrentHedden]

There certainly are many plugins that I've seen that will interface with a barcode scanner. This whole concept that you've told is totally possible.

Without thinking about it too much, maybe something like this - one table that had all of the product descriptions, etc... including the barcode #. Then, for each scan, create a new record in another table that basically holds the barcode #. Once all the scanning is done, you can create finds and reports on how many of the same barcode # was previously scanned in. You would also want to create a relationship between the two tables so you can get full product info.

Since each scanner is a bit different that the others, you might have to write the program for that particular scanner.