Scanning a gift voucher

Hey Tim!

We were on the way to doing this at MRC but I never quite got there before I left. There would be two parts to it:

Through the mask field on the Ticket Design element for your gift voucher number barcode, you would need to add a prefix to make these numbers unique to any other barcode you would scan. You could use a prefix like "GV". A simple IF statement int he mask with both outcomes for true or false would work. eg: IF(val='0','GV'+val,'GV'+val).

The second part would be coding your scanners to recognise that when a barcode has the first two characters of GV (as an example), you would do a series of keyboard shortcuts to input the data correctly. eg: automatically tab in the payment screen to the gift voucher input field and type in the rest of the barcode number (without the GV prefix). We purchased Motorola off the shelf POS scanners that came with software to configure them that handled things like this really really easily.

Hope that helps!

Beau @ Arts Centre Melbourne.

Hi Tim,

We implemented this at ACMI. We didn't include any sophisticated commit or navigation functions though. We just created a second  data field with the gift certificate number, and ticked the box for barcode (image below).

If your scanner let's you program in special commands like tab or return, you could make things a bit fancier.

The only other step was to use the scanner setup software to define the sentinels as per the docs. The sentinels may be unnecessary if all you are doing is using the scanner to enter the value of the barcode, but appear to be necessary if you want to also have the option to scan tickets for faster processing of ticket orders, or recording attendance through Tessitura. We have in the past asked our ticketing staff to rapidly scan a stack of used tickets in this manner.

Because of those additional features, I would recommend buying a scanner that lets you configure at least the sentinels.

Best,

Nicholas

Thanks guys, you've both been super helpful. :)

Hi Beau - do you recall at all the device name or model?

Hi Justin,

In case you don't get a response (since this topic is a few months old), the Motorola LS2208 is a common workhorse barcode scanner that is highly configurable in the manner described in this thread.

http://www.tessituranetwork.com/network/Products/Additional/Bar%20Code%20Scanners.aspx

Per this thread, we were inspired to purchase an LS2208 to play around with customizing, however, having some difficulties even getting the scanner/drivers to populate in the 123scan2 program.  

Did anyone have similar issues and/or remember how to resolve them?  

Any help is much appreciated, thanks! 

Maury,

I actually did have similar issues -- whereby the particular revision of the scanner (LS2208-SR20007R-NA) was not automatically included in the downloadable 123scan2 driver package, and wasn't updatable over the internet for some reason. I contacted the support desk of the vendor we purchased through (Barcodes Inc.) and they connected with Motorola's support team. We were able to resolve the issue when they manually sent us the updated driver package to use with the software.

This was almost two years ago, so I'm surprised the issue still persists, but if by chance you've got the same issue and scanner revision, I've uploaded the driver package I received from support to my profile: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/members/nicholasreilingh4883/files/LS2208_2D00_COMMON-MODELS_2D00_S_2D00_015.SCNPLG.zip.aspx