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Inventory Solutions for a Symbol SPT 1700

Hi There

I have an spt1700 which I want to use for Asset Inventory walkabouts. Problem is, symbol don't give you any software to do this.

I bought code warrior and I know C but its just too much work to write my own.

Does anyone know of any solutions out there which I can buy or download (free would be good) for doing basic Asset Inventory stuff. I have an asset management database and can produce CSV / tab sep files to upload or download either way.

thanks

itbeme

I did a similar project a while back.
For the palm application I used NSBasic, which is a good Rapid Application Development Tool(not free)
Then using the palm SDK; dveloped a conduit in VB/com controls to transfer data to SQL server.
anyways...
If you go the programming route, After you get your data into the pdb, I can help you get it from the palm to a csv or whatever you want and it shouldn't be much trouble at all.(Or does your asset management tool do the transfer part between the palm and desktop too?)

If your task requires no functionalities other than scanning; Depending on how often program will be used, who will be doing it, how much quality you want, Just scanning data into the memodb or a similar program then uploading and working with the data might be an efficient way of jerry-rigging such a system together.

plq

ASKER

NS Basic looks good, just went to their web site. The pricing seems to be low. Quality is important.

I want two versions of the software.

One to do "existence" audits, so we just go around zapping location codes and barcodes, and maybe an exception code if there's a problem with the asset

And one to do "update" audits, where you can scan a barcode and then a few fields from the asset record come up on a palm form for editing. This might also need dropdowns.

The backend software can import and export csv files so no problem, its just the file transfer which seems to be on palm already.

Did you manage to get nsbasic to talk to the scanning part of the scanner ok ? In codewarrior it was a nightmare. Can you trigger some nsbasic code as soon as a barcode is scanned ?

thanks

itbeme

Yes, no trouble with NSBasic and scanning bar codes. You can scan right into a field, or if you want it to trigger a code when there's a scanner event, thats easy too(I did it my project)[When a scanning event happens it calls event()]
The only trouble I had with scanning bar codes, was I was using POSE emulator to test the program, and it won't load nsbasic programs when they use scanning functions.

NSBasic produces a nice interface, only drawback is its not as fast as if you were to use codwarrior

It won't take anytime at all to make the NSBasic program to do the scanning stuff.

plq

ASKER

Thanks for your help. I'll give it a try.

Did you include any dropdowns or tables in your software ?

thanks again
Paul

itbeme

dropdowns yes, no problem there
Didn't use tables
There's some documentation on it in the tech notes.
http://www.nsbasic.com/palm/info/technotes/

These Technotes and 'NS Basic Programming for Palm OS' by Michael J. Verive are the two best references for NSBasic.

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plq

ASKER

thanks for your help