Comments on: Does anyone know of a way to scan a barcode entrys into an AS/400 display file, but not allow the scan ID to be manually entered from the keyboard?

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 01:46:22 +0000

So the scanner can input its own data? Can it be variable such as a sequence number?

How “programmable” is the scanner?

Tom

By: code2live

code2live — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:50:04 +0000

We have an application which uses a barcode containing the number with a check digit on the label to be scanned. But the human-readable number shown does not contain the check digit. So if they are trying to type it, they never know the correct last digit. (You might want to limit their “tries”, in case they’re persistent and try all ten digits!)
Combining that with the other suggestions (such as Non-displaying the barcode input) would be almost indefeatable!

Users have a manual entry screen separate from the barcode input screen, but requires supervisor access.

Btw: we store the identifying number with it’s check digit for each of lookup (using program code of course) but no users can view the table/file. We also store the Id as a value in the table/file, so the support personnel can see it.

Hope this helps!

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:07:28 +0000

@Slateken:

Nice addition. Perhaps not “foolproof” but well worth the minimal extra effort. It’s probably all that’s needed to be included.

Tom

By: slateken

slateken — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:54:25 +0000

I use a similar approach. As Tom mentioned, it is not “foolproof”, but so far it has sufficed. I set up the scanner(s) to send a 3 character prefix for each scan. (How-to information can be found in the scanner manual). I try to set the prefix up to send at least one character that a user would not normally type (a left or right bracket for instance).

Then I added a 3-position alpha field to the DDS to handle the prefix — this is the field that is checked for validity as Farmer does. I set this field up to be “Non-Display” so that the user does not even see the prefix when the scan is sent to the display. For every scan, this field is tested to determine that the 3 character PREFIX field exactly matches. I have the input field for the actual barcode data set up as NON-DISPLAY also so that they do not even see the scanned data until it has passed the validity check.

Sample DDS:

A            PREBARNUM      3A  B  6 42CHGINPDFT(CS)   
A                                      DSPATR(HI)      
A                                      DSPATR(ND)      
A            BARNUM        15A  B  7 42CHGINPDFT(CS)  
A                                      DSPATR(HI)     
A                                      COMP(GT ' ')   
A                                      CHECK(ER)      
A                                      DSPATR(ND)

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:44:26 +0000

Why couldn’t some type “+H” in the first two positions?

Tom

By: farmer

farmer — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:23:12 +0000

I had to do the same thing for my company. If scanned the value of the first 2 positions was a +H. We don’t and never will have Item numbers that start with +H so this made for an easy check. So all I had to do in my program was if I didn’t find +H in the first 2 positions I knew they keyed in something into the field via keyboard. So I would just throw up an error message stating that they must scan the Item Number, no manual entry was allowed. Hope this helps!