By Len Ott, Chief Technology Officer
Sometimes, when you scan a barcode, the data that comes out isn't exactly what you need for your application. For example, the data might be formatted differently or have extra or missing characters compared with what is required.
To help customers who face this problem, Socket Mobile is very excited to add new Data Editing capability to our SocketScan 10 keyboard wedge software. With this new feature, data scanned with our CHS Series 7 or CRS Series 9 Bluetooth barcode scanners can be automatically manipulated before it is sent to a application!
Some of the Data Editing operations you can perform include:
- Remove characters
- Insert characters
- Change character case
- Modify characters
You can even string together various operations to do some very complicated scenarios. One common scenario is to take a block of data such as from a name badge or driver's license and break it up into separate fields for first name, last name, address line, city, etc., so that each field can be entered into a web app or remote console session. Customers have also asked us to support scenarios such as converting characters to lower case and inserting a character sequence at the start or end of all barcodes.
Availability
Our first release of SocketScan 10 with Data Editing will be for Android OS, available June 3. At that time, you'll be able to download the updated keyboard wedge software from Google Play or get the SDK from our Developer Portal.
Data Editing will be added to SocketScan 10 for Windows and Windows Embedded Handheld by the end of June.
If you'd like an early copy, email developers@socketmobile.com.
Why Not Configure the Hardware?
Socket Mobile 2D barcode scanners — the CHS 7Xi and 7XiRx — do provide some data editing capability directly in the hardware. However it is pretty complicated and time consuming to set up and involves creating one or more custom configuration barcodes. Plus, after you've configured the scanner, you can't determine the current setting!
Additionally, Socket Mobile 1D barcode scanners don't include any data editing capabilites and only have very limited prefix/suffix support.
What's So Cool about Data Editing with SocketScan 10?
With the new Data Editing feature of SocketScan 10 software, you can have virtually unlimited prefix/suffix options for ALL Socket Mobile barcode scanners. What's more, the Data Editing operations are kept on the host device, so that any Socket Mobile scanner that connects to it will operate the same way!
With Data Editing, you can restrict operations to be "triggered" by certain barcode characteristics, such as:
- Specific symbologies
- Barcodes of a specific length or range
- Barcodes that start, end or contain a specific character or string.
You can save multiple Data Editing profiles and enable the one most appropriate to your current application or scenario. Profiles can be exported from one system and imported to others as an XML file, even cross-platform! So you could design your data editing scenario on a Windows 7 system and export the profile to your Android or Windows Mobile device!
For a detailed description of Data Editing, please refer to the CHS User's Guide (page 41).
What about Apple iOS?
Unfortunately, Data Editing is only supported on platforms where we can implement a keyboard wedge (i.e., Android, Windows, Windows Embedded Handheld and BlackBerry). There is no keyboard wedge support for Apple iOS, however, SocketScan 10 SDK, which includes iOS support, has been updated to include APIs for data editing. For details, please refer to the updated SDK API document, which you can download from our Developer Portal on June 3.
What's on Your Wish List?
For future releases, we are considering features such as support for non-printable characters like F1-F2 and the Control key.
What data editing scenarios would you like to do? We would love to hear from you! Send any scenarios or feature requests to developers@socketmobile.com, and we'll see what we can do!
Not in our Developer Program? Register today at http://developer.socketmobile.com/