Futureproofing barcodes for NScan

Hi Graeme,

In Tessitura V12.1 and N-Scan v6.0 you have the ability to specify the format of either a customer number or a specific membership number (or both).  You supply two parameters, the prefix and the total length of the value being scanned.  So if you wanted to use customer number you could specify ‘C’ as the prefix.  To determine the total length you would want to find out what your longest customer number, allow for some growth and add the length of the prefix.  So if for example 572084 was your current longest number you might add 2 digits for growth and end up with a resulting barcoded value of C00572084.  Notice that the customer number is zero-padded on the left.  To find the customer number N-Scan will strip off the prefix and attempt to convert the remaining value to an integer so you want to be sure to always pad to the left with however many zeros are needed to match the specified total length.  Since you like to keep barcodes as short as possible you can decide how much padding you think you really need for your situation.

Ron

There are a few things to understand here…  In N-Scan 6.0 we changed the names of all the database tables and procedures to conform to Tessitura standard conventions.  We also purposely left the old database objects in place so that, among other things, any customizations that had been done would not get accidentally lost.  There was a grey area when it came to a few of the procedures in 5.31 that were intended for customization, like LRP_NSCAN_USER_MEMBERSHIP (I think all of these had USER in the name).  Instead of just reusing the existing procedures we also made new versions of these as well, simply changing LRP in the name to LP, so now for example you will see LP_NSCAN_USER_MEMBERSHIP.  So if in 5.31 you had made no customizations to the standard procedures but had just created custom logic in LRP_NSCAN_USER_MEMBERSHIP then after upgrading to v6.0 you could just copy that code into the new LP_NSCAN_USER_MEMBERSHIP and your code should get invoked same as before.

I do want to point out that in 5.31 and 6.0 this custom procedure is only called from scans in Special Access Areas, not from scans of regular events. I only mention this because I don’t know if you had additional customizations to call that procedure from somewhere else.  In Special Access Areas in 6.0 the custom procedure is called before the newly added standard membership recognition logic so should continue to work.  The new standard membership logic works in for both events and access areas.

Ron

From: Technology Roadmap Forum [mailto:forums-nextgeneration@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Christopher Sherwood
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2014 2:22 PM
To: Ron Wilson
Subject: RE: [Technology Roadmap Forum] Futureproofing barcodes for NScan

@Ron-

Will customization applied in LRP_NSCAN_USER_MEMBERSHIP continue to function?

The only reason I ask is that we are about to roll out our membership cards based on Premium/Membership/Customer using an interleaved HEX encoding scheme. (basically three interleaved integers, a prefix and a checksum for a total of 28 characters)

I ended on the idea of using a Premium to represent the actual membership card as a physical entity in Tessitura since I foresee cards requiring revocation, and of course those edge cases of merged accounts with deleted membership records (where the card would then be valid for the customer/membership found in the database)

TL;DR

Will custom barcodes still work?