Hello All,
I forget whether it is allowed on here to ask about consultants, I know you aren’t supposed to come on here as a consultant and promote services, but I think I can ask?
Looking for any recommendations on consultants that have successfully built and coded an integration with bartender’s integration builder.
Thanks in advance everyone!
-Utah
Are you limited from using the FileMonitor service? The integration path for this method is extremely simple (csv output essentially)
Hi Utah,
Yeah, I try not to advertise on here as a consultant but if you want to DM me I’d be happy to discuss…
Adding to what Zach said, the BarTender side of things is usually the simple part of an integration. It’s designing the processes, what labels need to print and how they are triggered from Epicor that tends to be the hard part…
We need to print a label that has a query to the database. We will not have all the data up front.
Sounds interesting. There’s a ton of different ways to go about label printing, but if you use a BPM, Customization, Function, etc. from Epicor that builds and sends a file to BarTender then you can query the Db all you want in order to send BT the dataset it needs.
okay cool, we are using customizations to do this on the UI via a button click at the moment, but we aren’t using bartender integration, we are using a direct method where we call the bartender.exe and we send the label file we want to print along with the following parameters: PackNumber & PackLine or JobNumber, and number of copies).
So in short, we just need to write this stuff to a file instead and the bartender integration can take care of the rest by reading the file?
-Utah
Epicor’s default implementation uses the file writing method.
Create an Integration in the Integration Builder, setup with a simple Print Command Script action. There is also the File Detection settings, but those are self explanatory.
Your command script would look something like this:
%BTW% /AF="c:\PhysicalPath\To\Labels\OnBTServer\MyLabel.btw" /D="<Trigger File Name>" /C=1 /PRN="(Your Printer Path Here)" /P
%END%
"PONumber","PartNumber","OutDescription","Operator","Qty","PartDescription"
"226735","0021-13575","COMP","EpicorUser","60.00000000","Black anodize per MIL-8625 Type 2 Class 2"
(Trigger File Name is intentional, printer path is not)
Create a BPM to write this data. Columns are defined once, each newline is a new row.
yeah, so BT Integration Builder replaces a “middleware” application called Commander. Commander more or less watches a folder for a file, reads it and works with BT to actually print something. So if you use epicor to push a file it would need to have the BT label template name, printer name, number of copies, and the actual dataset for the label (probably some other stuff too that I don’t remember off the top of my head). So it’s not really an “integration” per se, it’s more like how SSRS works. Integration Builder has more bells and whistles than Commander, but you can use the file method to make it work like Commander if you want to take that approach.
I think you can have BT Integration Builder actually touch the epicor Db but I’m not sure I’d recommend that. It can also do web service integrations now, which will probably become the preferred option down the road.
I just went in and rewrote our Bartender functions. Now that we’re on Kinetic, I was able to really streamline our processes because we can call functions within the same library. Now when I need to do a new one, it’s really as simple as setting up the template. In fact (for me at least) it takes longer to design the actual label than it does to set the system up to spit out the data which the integration uses…