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RickCummingsRickCummings 

Reading Bar Codes on PDF Documents

Hello there,


Here's what we are trying to do.....


We have an external system that creates selling documents that are loaded into SFDC. These documents are saved on the user's personal computer, There may be between 1 and 50 documents - or more - created.


The user uploads these documents to SFDC where they are attached to a custom object. The custom object is also designed to hold the value of specific meta data related to each document (e.g.. Document type, etc...).


To facilitate ease of use, we have created a Multi File Upload process using Flex. This allows the user to pick many files for batch uploads. These files are then attached to the custom object.


Since we cannot depend on any naming convention, the users then need to access each custom object and populate the meta data manually.


We would like to mechanize the population of the meta data.


Our plan is to create a bar code containing the meta data on each document during creation time. Then during the multi file upload process, we hope to decode the bar code and populate the meta data pragmatically. We are working on building an Active/x-COM object that decodes the bar code and returns the meta data values.


The key to this operation is for us to invoke the COM object from the flex program (or from APEX if that doesn't work).


Has anyone done something similar? Is COM a good choice for technology? Any advice available?
Thanks...


Rick Cummings │System Architect -- IT │SuperMedia LLC
T. 978-762-1747 │M. 603-401-2580 │F. 978-762-1655
 

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
kxa422kxa422

I'm not sure that you can call a COM object from apex, a webservice is possible.

The other idea could be to do it directly on the user computer during the upload process, there is a couple of solution to read a PDF file and extract barcode.

If your files are located on a server, a webserver could be called when users upload the file in the system.

All Answers

gv007gv007

Very interesting question.Rick where are you storing the documents in SF?.I am curious to know about it.

kxa422kxa422

I'm not sure that you can call a COM object from apex, a webservice is possible.

The other idea could be to do it directly on the user computer during the upload process, there is a couple of solution to read a PDF file and extract barcode.

If your files are located on a server, a webserver could be called when users upload the file in the system.

This was selected as the best answer