Can I get key presses on the main MES form regardless of what has the focus? I mean I figure that it will be easy enough to add an even handler on the form, but what if the form loses focus to a button or grid, etc?
What I hope to do (feel free to explain why this is a horrible idea) is to make barcodes with special codes (sequences) that I can use to perform actions. For example - I’d have a XFER INV barcode that when scanned, would open up the XFER INV screen.
Why not just click a button you say? Well, there are ALOT of buttons/tabs and our workforce here is not too tech saavy. I am just looking for any things I can do to simplify their lives as well as increase the odds of them properly executing the process.
On a side note, I notice there are some keyshortcuts:
W: WorkQueue
D: Downtime
L: Logout
N: Non-conformance
C: Close
I don’t see why you couldn’t turn on KeyPreview… doesn’t sound like a great idea in general. But it “SHOULD” work… I might suggest though that you create pared down versions of MES with just the few buttons each station needs.
If all they are doing is clocking in and out of jobs hide the rest… etc…
Thanks for the input - I had considered pruning down some of the buttons. I don’t remember why I deviated from that thought but I’ll take your advice and make it so!
Bit late to the question, but I will confirm your thought. I worked at a place the manufactured AC equipment - coils and air handlers. I built equipment to test that the air handler worked and measured the amps to validate the motor and heating elements where in spec.
I set it up so the operator scanned the unit ‘tracker’ (serial number validated by database to be at the correct place) and then scanned the start bar code. I structured it such that the first 3 characters where always ‘CMD’ so I could identify the scan. The rest would be a command like ‘START12’ with 12 being the testing machine ID and ‘STOP12’ to cancel a test. This worked wonderfully. The operator never touched the keyboard.
I used the KeyPreview feature get get the scanned string and Regular Expressions to identify the ‘CMD’ characters. Then processed the string from there. Very do-able.