BarTender 101?

[jkane (John Kane)]

Can someone either point me to a quick tutorial on what needs to be done to get BT operating with Epicor? Or can someone give me the bullet points of what needs to be done?

I have BT installed and know I have to drop a csv file somewhere on the server, but I don’t know how to get the csv file there. Is it a BAQ, RDD, SSRS, or something else all together?

Total noob as you can see.

Thanks in advance.

[Banderson (Brandon Anderson)]

You can use SSRS… but…

in my experience most people end up just writing some code to write out a csv to the drop location. From BPM is probably the best because you don’t have to worry about network permissions, but you can do it from the client as well. Here’s a thread that walks through when I learned to do it on the client. (Man that seems like a long time ago.)

Write to CSV with button. Used for Bartender

I was going to post this at the end of another thread, but I wasn’t really related to the original question. I want to as Chris Conn a question about how he writes out the CSV files for bartender (he references it in an answer about labels), and I think that this could be my first foray into putting some custom coding into a dashboard. Is there a way to mention/tag a specific person in a topic? Anyways, here’s my question. Chris, How hard would it be to get a button like you have there to fi…

[jtownsend (John Townsend)]

I literally rolled out my first Bartender project last week. We’ve used SSRS for 1D barcodes, but we had a customer requirement for 2D matrix and SSRS is not the tool for that.

Anyway, Bartender comes with an API now. It’s 2021 and there’s need to fuss with file drops. I used a BPM that sends a HTTP post to bartender with some E10 part and serial number data included and BT fires off the printer. It did require ~20 lines of C# in a Custom Code block. I could have also done a form customization to achieve this, but I don’t like putting things like this on the UI level.

[Banderson (Brandon Anderson)]

To use the API, you need the highest level license don’t you?

[jtownsend (John Townsend)]

I want to say we have the Automation license.

EDIT: Yep, Automation.

[jkane (John Kane)]

Thanks @Banderson & @jtownsend this is perfect to get me started. Guess I am going to have to finally learn REST as that does sound like the easiest way to connect.

EDIT: Guess I am going BPM as REST is 2021 and above and I am 2016

[Doug.C (Doug Crabtree)]

@jtownsend

Anyway, Bartender comes with an API now. It’s 2021 and there’s need to fuss with file drops. I used a BPM that sends a HTTP post to bartender with some E10 part and serial number data included and BT fires off the printer. It did require ~20 lines of C# in a Custom Code block. I could have also done a form customization to achieve this, but I don’t like putting things like this on the UI level.

This is good news. You could always create a function that does this coding…

[jtownsend (John Townsend)]

Can you not update to 2021?

Updating to BarTender 2021 – BarTender Support Portal (seagullscientific.com)

[Banderson (Brandon Anderson)]

@jkane

EDIT: Guess I am going BPM as REST is 2021 and above and I am 2016

BPM is on the epicor side, REST is on the bartender side. You’ll need some sort of code on the Epicor side, (customization or BPM) and that will use REST to send something to bartender. If you can’t use REST on the bartender side you simply use the drop file. That doesn’t mean you won’t need a BPM.

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

You can also call the bartender.exe application in C# code and send it a report path for the report you wish to print.

If you have parameters in the bartender label you can pass it the file name with the parameters.

It sounds like REST is the way to go though.