I am trying to get our company up and running using barcodes on the production floor for common MES functions. I thought (maybe that’s the problem?) it would be an easy “starting point” to have someone scan their username for the Log In screen - eliminating the need for someone to key it in. We are looking at a touch screen panel PC and likely won’t have a keyboard attached unless we need to do some kind of maintenance/setup.
I get the scanner to scan my login ID and I am trying to get it to hit Enter to submit. I have put the $M character after my login. When I scan in Notepad, it seems to work as though I’m hitting the Enter key. But in the login screen, it just enters my login and I still have to click the OK button. If I do the same thing on the keyboard and hit Enter after typing my login in, it works. It also works if I use the Enter suffix on the scanner, rather than the tab suffix. What’s the trick with using an Enter button in a barcode?
I agree that it is $J, but neither works still. I can be in the text field, type my employee ID and hit Enter, and it works. But when I encode my employee ID with a $J or a $M, it does not work to submit the login info. If I take that same barcode and scan it while in Microsoft Word, It shows my login with a line feed under it. So it is scanning that character in, but it’s not doing the thing in MES.
I’d think it would be rare, but the UI could be looking for specific keyboard scan codes, as opposed to the ASCII character they represent. When you press the ‘1’ key the code 0x02 is sent down the wires to the computer. The computer interprets that as a ‘1’ (ASCII 0x31).
To get an exclamation point ‘!’, yo press a shift key which sends 0x2a (for the left shift) or a 0x36 (for the right shift key), and with the the shift key still held down, press the ‘1’ key which sends the 0x02 code. The computer then interprets 0x2a + 0x02 as an exclamation point as ASCII 0x21.
But very doubtful it is looking for that.
Have you tried inserting tabs and spaces in the barcode? First see if this works on the keyboard. Enter the ID, count how many TAB press it takes to get the OK control to be in focus, and then press the space bar.
If it took three tab presses to get to the OK control, the string the barcode shoud represent would be including the start and stop asterisks): *UserID$I$I$I * (notice a space before the closing *)
Print as a barcode and then scan into word confirm it encoded correctly