Barcode scanner data extraction - c#

I am developing a POS(Point of Sale) sort of app with C# and involves using barcode scanner.I can scan the code with ease.My question is, can we extract details such as Price, Product Name and so on, directly from the scanned code or those details have to be stored in a DB that can be fetched comparing the scanned code?
Plz help.

Are you making your own codes or just scanning for example a store bought product? usually stores don't store that kind of details on their barcodes neither should them, with no database would be kinda hard to make discounts in certain occasions. My advice is to be more clear on what you pretend. Anyway just download a barcode app for mobile and try to see what an regular barcode contains. That may get you going. I used to work in a store that had a database for that, i might be able to help you but need to know more.

Related

Is it possible for a website to input from camera and OCR

I have a website that is used on location to enter railcar numbers.
What I would really like to do is allow users to use their cell phones to image the railcar number and use OCR to input it into the system.
There is a lot of free and not-free OCR software available, but all I found take an image as input. And at least in some cases, the image needs to be uploaded to the server for processing. If the user needs to take a photo, upload it to the site and wait for processing, it probably won't be any faster than entering the data manually.
My question is, is there any way to do this directly from the camera from a website? And is it possible to do client-side?
Does anyone have experience with anything like this? I'm using C#/.NET, but the answer doesn't need to be specific to that.

Can I use templates from a SQL table and fill on that the information saved on another table using Winforms?How can I let to download it as PDF file?

I am creating a template for a CV. It is stored in a database table as an image with format VARBINARY(MAX). I am going to load them to Winforms to be able to add labels on the template and fill the information in the labels. The information for the template is saved in another table of the database.
Now I need to fill the information on my templates using winforms and then save them on the device by choosing a PDF from the dialog bar.
What can I use for doing this? Is there any tool which can help me doing so?
You are asking quite a few different questions here, without giving too much detail. I'll try to give some guidance, but without a lot more detail, it's hard to be specific.
First, the question doesn't have anything to do with WinForms, what you are asking would be the same in pretty much any approach, so I'll ignore WinForms.
If you have the template in a database table, presumably as plain text (which could of course be HTML, PostScript or any other markup language) with placeholders, and you have the data in another table, then you can simply merge the two together to produce the CV in plain text.
Once you have the merged CV, converting it to PDF is best done with a library. It's not the sort of thing you want to try doing yourself. Which library you use depends a lot on your requirements and budget. There are one or two free ones, but I can't say how good they are, as I use a commercial one. I'm not making any specific recommendations here, but a bit of searching and experimenting should get you what you want.
Hope that answers you questions. If not, please edit your question to include more specific information.

.NET program scan renderable text in Chart in .PDF - not for words but for values - Text Location features?

Hello I have a chart that I need to have the system review and give results...
Chart image located here....
example chart .pdf http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/651/scorecardchartexample.gif/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/651/scorecardchartexample.gif/
--Assume the chart is in .PDF and the text is renderable I.E. "highlight-able".
--Assume the chart is placed on the page exactly the same way and same position every time
--Assume the chart can change - that is to say, I need to be able to upload a 1000 of these charts all following the exact same format but with some alternate info from chart to chart.
--Assume VAST expertise in .NET - and little expertise in actual text interpretation.
--Assume expertise in interpreting .PDF that have editable fields...I am already doing this, this is limited to .PDF's I created and was able to place values on each field etc.
--Assume this chart is only deliverable in a single text renderable .PDF - that is to say - we interact with a website that creates this chart - this website has no API to interact with, we must print to PDF this chart from the webpage and that is all we can do...(government website)
Using a .NET system, I need to create a program...or incorporate an existing application into my .NET system, that will review this chart and will be able to tell what each "X" represents...that is to say an "X" one inch to the left or in the next row is an indicator of a different result (refer to chart)
I need the program to perform its search and return results based on the trigger of the .PDF document hitting a folder or whatever. This part we can handle assuming we creating the program from scratch...otherwise we will be limited to interacting with an existing app as needed.
We are open to a variety of strategies. Assuming such a class or object exists, we were thinking of reading text based on location in the document, like an X,Y sort of thing. Another desireable route would be some sort of stringBuffer (assume C#) but will need to be able to navigate the chart gridlines and will need to count white spaces to accurately interpret the position of the "X"'s and what the "X" means based on its placement. 3rd option, something we are unware of.
If something exists and is tried and true, well that of course woould be best. Then any tips on interfacing with it using .NET and C#.
Thank you all very much in advance Code Gawds!
Reel
OK We found some software called ClearImage - it wasn't cheap but it is pretty neat. It will analyze any image in the same fashion Adobe PDF analyzes a document to find form fields. After clear image does that it gives you a list of "blobs" you then get to dictate what each blob means and give it a unique identifer. This allows for auto value declaration based on "blob" placement in the image.
It also allows to sort of "finger print" an image so if the same image were to show up it could recognize it...in my case we have 3 different templates for the chart, and indeed each one will be different due to different charting, but ultimately each template has the same layout from multiples of the chart...this has helped in allowing our system to identfy what chart has been entered then after that first check, move on to anyalizing each blob.
Anyway, worth a look if anyone else should come across this question and is in need this type of function. I didn't want to leave it unanswered. I may update this as we learn more about it. I know this isn't exactly a coding question but this type of task is coding intensive and if anyone was looking to perform the same task they may find their way here. I will endeavor to update in the spirit of stackoverflow with comments relating to integration and objects etc. etc.
should anyone have more questions about this software in relation to coding you can ask here or post a new question, we will be happy to post our code (methods, classes objects etc.) we used (in C#) in terms of integrating it into our/your programs.

Barcode to Product Name Converter

We are designing a mobile shopping system.
The camera on the phone will read the barcode and then we have to convert the barcode to a standard product name in order to save it to our database.
We are saving it to our database because we are connecting to a web service of local e-commerce sites to get their price about the related product. We are sending the product name to get the price from them, so that the user can see the prices, compare and buy.
We cannot send barcode number to get the data from the e-commerce sites because some sites do not have the info of the barcode number.
I have to somehow get the product name by only knowing the barcode. Google returns the result when barcode number is searched. But how am I going to parse the data? or how am I going to know which answer of google search best suits my input?
Is there a site that sells barcode and product name data match?
We are designing the system with C#
Thanks alot.
I think what you are looking for is a "UPC lookup" website. Try googling for "UPC lookup". There are lots of possibilities like upcdatabase.com.
I've had pretty good luck using https://developers.google.com/shopping-search/. I believe you can look at how the barcode scanning app Zxing uses it # Android Bar Code results from lookup into app ZXing
Instead of searching Google's general web index, search Google Shopping or amazon.

Extract data from nested tables in PDF

I have a few pdf files that were created from word or excel files.
I need to get the information thats in the tables.
The text in the document is not an image so I'm able to extract the text using tools such as pdfbox.
When I have the text I have no way of knowing what cells in the table it belongs to because I don't know where the table borders are.
Iv'e tried a few desktop tools such as abby or solid pdf converter and they are able to convert the files into nice word documents but this doesn't suit my needs as I want to be able to do this programatticly in C#.
Some of the tables have nested tables wich I think makes this a little bit more diffucult.
I appreciate your help
The difficulty here is caused by the fact that the text in the PDF is not contained within any table. It might look like it is, but underneath the surface, it is not.
So there are a couple of options that I can think of. But none of them are going to be quite as satisfying as you'd probably like.
There are some companies that offer SDKs for PDF to Excel/Word conversion. Investintech and Iceni are a couple of examples. But these solutions are not free.
If you know the exact layout of the PDF files that you need to extract the table data from, then you can use any SDK that lets you extract text from a PDF and also tells you the exact co-ordinates of the extracted text. Using this method you need to know in advance where the text is going to be, so that you can extract text from a specific area on the page. It obviously won't work if you need to process any random document.
It's a difficult task, but hopefully this will give you a starting point.

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