Hello,
We're in the process of creating some new membership cards and wanted to include a barcode of the constituent number for the customer. Thinking long-term what's the best way of future proofing this for upcoming NScan releases? Will NScan recognise customer numbers if the barcode begins with a C? e.g C572084 for a customer with a constituent ID of 572084
Many thanks
GraemeThe Roundhouse
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
Hi Ron,
Thanks for this. Really helpful stuff.
Grae
At ACMI, all of our membership cards have a C prefix, which was to work with an NScan customisation for scanning in member events. This is something we are looking to drop as the functionality becomes standard in the new N-Scan :)
We have never had leading zero's in the barcode though. Ron, is there a strong use case for this, and is it a recommended approach?