This article is the third and final article in a series of three dedicated to using barcodes in Alpha Five. The first two articles appeared in the July 2002 ("Barcoding in Alpha Five - Part 1") and the September 2002 ("Barcoding in Alpha Five - Part 2") Alpha Newsletter. If you are new to barcoding, and have not done so, please consider reading those two articles now, as they contain the information on which this article is built.
Portable data collectors are available from dozens of manufacturers. The "Tricoder" from Worthdata.com is one example of such a device. It's capabilities and format are similar to those of other such collectors, so this review of using a Tricoder with Alpha Five should give you a fairly good idea on how to incorporate any similar device into your application.
In choosing the Tricoder, I considered the following:
1) Price was very reasonable compared to other models.
2) Programming the Tricoder was easily done through a Windows interface similar to that for field rule entry in Alpha Five. The program could also be written or changed right from the keyboard of the device itself.
3) The size allowed it to easily hang from a belt with the addition of a leather holster.
4) It allowed, when programmed accordingly, a pick list to be loaded and reviewed. In other words, not only could it collect data, it could give the user feedback on a UPC by showing information on the item that was scanned. Such information might include a description, cost, and the computer's calculation of the quantity on hand.
5) It allowed verbal commands to be recorded and played back during usage. That is, not only did it request a UPC via text on the 4 line screen, the programmer could record a two second message asking the user to "Scan the UPC" in any language the person recording the message could speak! In the example we will build below, we could easily record two such voice prompts. The first prompting the user to "Scan the UPC", and the second prompting the user to "Enter the quantity on hand". A very nice feature that speeds up data entry!
While there are hundreds of scenarios where one might use a data collector, we'll use a more common example to present this information to you. Let's imagine we own a small office supply store. As we are a computerized company, we have a very efficient replenishment system designed in Alpha Five! This replenishment system keeps track of our sales and the current on-hand quantity of every product. As our sales depend on having our products in stock at all times, the software generates orders for our suppliers on a daily basis.
Now, the Alpha Five can do a LOT of things, but it, like any other software, can't determine what items were stolen from the store, or what items are un-sellable for other reasons, such as torn packaging. For this very reason, most retailers inventory their stock on a regular basis. With computer on-hands in synch with the actual stock levels, the software generates the appropriate orders to keep the shelves full, and the customers happy!
With all this in mind, we decide to inventory our store once a year. The scenario is simple. We want to load a tricoder with a master list of every UPC-A we carry, set the Tricoder up with a small program to collect the on hands for each UPC that is scanned, then dump the information back into our replenishment system.
Here's how we do it...
In our replenishment system, we have one table that lists every UPC we carry in the store, one record for each item. We call this our master.dbf. Please review the section titled "SETTING UP UPC-A IN ALPHA FIVE:" in the July 2002 ("Barcoding in Alpha Five - Part 1") article for the specific field rules required for a master table. In that article, we called it lookup1.dbf.
Here is the structure for our master table, and the items we carry:
GETTING ALPHA FIVE READY TO RECEIVE DATA:
Our first step is to create a table called inventory.dbf that mirrors our master.dbf above. We can use the Alpha Five's duplicate feature to do this. Once the master table is duplicated as inventory.dbf, we need to make the following changes:
1) We need to empty the inventory.dbf table.
2) We need to modify two field rules:
a) Set the upc_code field so it is no longer allows only unique values (We may, during our store inventory, have several places where we have the same item merchandised, so we want to allow for the possibility of several records.)
b) Set the model_no, description, cost, and retail fields to skip all the time by placing .T. in the expression box.
3) We need to restructure the inventory.dbf table, adding a numeric field called "on_hand_qty", as shown below"
Inventory.dbf will become the linking table between the Tricoder and the Alpha Five replenishment system.
The second step is to create a form called "Tricoder Transfer Form" for the inventory.dbf, simply embedding a browse table on it as such:
1) On the onInit event for the form, we need to place the following code so the form opens in non-edit mode:
2) We need to place the following code on the 'Start Tricoder Transfer' button's OnPush event. The code first places the form in edit mode, then starts a new record, then changes focus from the button back to the embedded browse.
O.K., we now have everything set up to receive data from the Tricoder. It may be a good idea to open the 'Tricoder Transfer Form' as a dialog box by placing the following code on the button used to open the form. By doing so, you will help to prevent the form from losing focus when transferring data from the Tricoder to Alpha Five.
PROGRAMMING THE TRICODER:
There will be a few decisions you will have to make when you are first setting up the device. How you set up the core settings for the device will depend on what you are using it for. One such decision will be how you designate chunks of memory. (For the most part, the Tricoder is ready to use right out of the box.)
One mandatory setting will be allocating how you want to use your memory. A Tricoder, or any such device, has a limited amount of memory. It really doesn't need much - Even the largest retail stores such as Kmart, which has 50,000 items in it's larger stores, only have devices with 2 megs of memory. The fact is that that much is rarely needed!
Tricoders currently ship with 512k of memory. A Tricoder can store three programs and it's settings without tapping into the 512K. The 512k gets divided up into six different partitions. Three for the data you collect so you can segregate what you collect into three different groups, and three for the tables (or lookup lists) you upload into the Tricoder. Further information is available with whichever device you purchase, and this is very easy to configure!
You will also need to pick a COM port when transferring data to and from the Tricoder.
Now, there are two parts to our situation that we need to set up in the Tricoder. We need to upload a unique list of UPC codes that we carry, and we need to create a program to prompt and collect the store inventory.
Let's do the lookup table list first. Quite simply, we take our master.dbf and export the UPC's as a *.tbl file. We'll call it master.tbl, and save this operation as 'Tricoder_Lookup_Table'. This is the operation card for the export:
Once created, the master.tbl file must now be modified slightly. The first line must read "12000000000MASTER" where the twelve represents the twelve digits in the UPC-A, the nine zeros are other settings not used in this table (they are used for pick lists), and MASTER is the name of the *.tbl file.
Now we need to move this master.tbl file into the Tricoder. This is done via the serial port with an easy to use utility that ships with the Tricoder, as shown below:
Now we need to create a program for the Tricoder that prompts the user for data. We'll use the "Virtual Tricoder" software that ships with the Tricoder. The program is quite simple. We need three steps to our program: Ask the user to scan the UPC, then ask for his on hand count, then ask the user if he wants to continue the loop, or end the program. We ask if he wants to continue to give the user the option of stopping!
Each of the three above steps is a 'statement' in the program. Below are the three statements. You can see that most settings are radio buttons, and while you may need to reference the manual, it is very easy to write and deploy the program!
Statement 1: (You'll notice the 'Data ID' points to the Tricoder designation for the lookup master.tbl - this prevents a rogue UPC from being scanned in and causing rejection issues when the data is being moved into Alpha Five! If the user scans a UPC that is not in the master.tbl file, he is alerted that the item is not found, both on the screen, and when a built in voice message chirps out "Item not found" through the built in speaker or an earphone!) (Voice Msg 1 is recording #31, which is my voice saying "Scan the upc!")
Statement 2: (Voice Msg 1 is recording #32, which is my voice saying "Enter on hand!")
Statement 3: (You'll notice the On NO goto statement is 99... This tells the Tricoder to end the program!) (Voice Msg 1 is recording #33, which is my voice saying "Continue?")
We can now save the program. We'll call it Alpha_Five_Pgm.tri. It is the easy to send the program to the Tricoder (via the serial port) by pressing the 'Send' button on the Virtual Tricoder and following the simple instructions!
We are now ready to collect and dump data! You simply run the program on the Tricoder, collecting the data, then upload the data from the Tricoder into the 'Tricoder Transfer Form' embedded browse (opened as a dialog box).
Now, you can see that this was a very simple setup, and the real world issues may not be quite as quickly resolved, but both Alpha Five and the Tricoder seem to work fluently together to make it as painless an ordeal as possible!
Here are some files you can download and review. The first file listed to download includes the 'Alpha_Five_Pgm.tri' file, so you can review the actual Tricoder program we wrote here. The 'Master.tbl' is also included:
Click here to download the VERSION 5 Tricoder files shown above!
Click here to download the Virtual Tricoder from WorthData.com!
Click here to download the Tricoder Utilities software from WorthData.com!