barcode city

[elijahsolly]

We use barcodes for student code, serial, etc. they are printed on our job sheet which gets printed for each device once a job is created. It would be good if we could have shorcut codes or something so that you could place barcodes on job sheets that when scanned automatically marks a device as returned and closes the job. you could have different barcodes for different reasons. one might just be to mark a job as ready to collect. this could be done by codes a barcode could look like this: ^011234 Where: ^ could tell disco that its a code 01 could be mark job as ready to collect 1234 is job number

[garysharp]

Interesting idea Elijah!

Firstly, while its currently possible to embed barcodes into Document Templates using a barcode font, it does mean that the barcode font needs to be present wherever a document is generated/printed. Perhaps we could investigate Disco providing the capacity of embedding barcodes (in a similar way as we do the QR code, photos, etc - see the ImageExt Extension Library).

Barcode "actions" are an interesting concept. There are a few things to consider here:

• User Interface/Experience - where will the user enter the barcode? a dedicated page? into the search box? Or anywhere on the page (hard to do correctly)? after the action completes, what sort of response should the user get?
• Permissions - what happens if the user doesn't have sufficient authorization to perform the action?
• Business-Intelligence Restrictions - what if the action cannot be performed due to BI rules? (for example: can't close job because the device is held)

Getting some discussion going on how we might solve these issues would be great.

As a side-note, in the 1.2.0725 release we introduced Search Shortcuts which cam be used right now with barcodes to quickly navigate to a Device/Job/User.

While there are definitely situations where this sort of "process" would be great I am concerned that some users might take advantage of "quickly" closing a job without carefully studying any information (such as recorded job notes or special instructions). Disco does try to encourage accuracy and completeness over speed - but it's an ongoing balancing-act. This will be something to be mindful of when addressing the above issues.

[elijahsolly]

Hmm some interesting points! User Interface/Experience - I would suggest the existing search box? Permissions - perhaps some sort of visual feedback could be provided e.g. "Sorry, you are not allowed to return devices" or "This device has been marked as returned" etc Business-Intelligence Restrictions - similar to the above comments, some feedback could be provided "This device is still held", "This device is still awaiting payment" potentially even an option to resolve the issue on the spot? e.g. perhaps scanning the close job code could mark a device as returned/paid/etc??

I did forget about the search shortcuts so they will be useful anyway!