Help Appreciated - Barcode Scanner data to Excel

[DataVisually]

Hi guys and gals. I have been charged with learning something completely new to me, and as much as I would like to say I am a quick learner, I find that half the battle is not knowing the question to ask, to get the answer I need. That being said, what I am trying to do seems relatively simple, it's just getting there, so i'll explain what I am trying to do and if someone can aim me in the right direction, it would be very much appreciated.

I have a TC20 barcode scanner, of course Android based. It does not have a standard camera as per most of the phones that are used in various YouTube videos. What you can do on this unit is press a button and it will decode a barcode to whatever field I have selected on whatever app at the time without having to do anything else. I believe there is a background service that constantly runs in the background that handles this.

I want to be able to scan a barcode, and on submission, be it automatically after scanning, or by pressing a submit button, pass that barcode information and a timestamp to a live open database or spreadsheet.

I HAVE been able to get this working following various tutorials into Google Sheets, but I am unable to query live data via Microsoft Access which is the tool of choice in the office (currently).

Thank you for taking the time to look at this post and I apologise in advance if this has been asked hundreds of times before, my limited understanding of how this works means I couldn't find it by directly searching... (back to not knowing the question to ask...)

 

[Unforgiven]

I'm not an Android dev, but have done extensive DB work and coding. I can't help with the coding, but maybe with a little idea on where to go with it.

So you can successfully scan into a field on an app? And you want to post that info into an Access DB alongside a timestamp.

I would use an app as a middleman to pass the barcode data to the DB then if you have the app working. Set up the table with the barcode field as one field and set the second field as a timestamp data type. This will populate the timestamp field whenever a record is saved.

 

[DataVisually]

I'm not an Android dev, but have done extensive DB work and coding. I can't help with the coding, but maybe with a little idea on where to go with it.

So you can successfully scan into a field on an app? And you want to post that info into an Access DB alongside a timestamp.

I would use an app as a middleman to pass the barcode data to the DB then if you have the app working. Set up the table with the barcode field as one field and set the second field as a timestamp data type. This will populate the timestamp field whenever a record is saved.

Thank you for the courtesy, the app currently works posting the fields (including a timestamp) into google sheets. However I would prefer to steer away from google sheet as I can't use MS Access to query it (unless someone knows of a way to link MS Access to GSheets?)

Alternatively, I would very much like to use the same app, but to post directly to a listening Access Database, that being said, I have no idea how to do that from an Android app, which will sit on a wifi connected device to the same network... Any options here?

 

[Unforgiven]

I'm long removed from web development and don't know what the current tech terms are, but posting it to a web server that writes to a DB was easy enough in my day. Though I'm sure the syntax is different nowadays it can't be that hard.

 

[DataVisually]

I'm long removed from web development and don't know what the current tech terms are, but posting it to a web server that writes to a DB was easy enough in my day. Though I'm sure the syntax is different nowadays it can't be that hard.

If you wouldn't mind, could I ask you for advice later? I imagine that I might need to do some web databasey things real soon and any advice would be fanastic!

 

[23tony]

I'm long removed from web development and don't know what the current tech terms are, but posting it to a web server that writes to a DB was easy enough in my day. Though I'm sure the syntax is different nowadays it can't be that hard.

This is pretty much what you're going to need - some sort of server you can post to. The server backend can be whatever - Java, PHP, Python, whatever you're comfortable working with. You will need to use mime-type multipart for the form processing.

Basically, set up a server with the backend for the form processing (the receiving end), and POST the image to that URL. Then the server can do the processing necessary to put the image into the database.

If you need help with that backend, I can offer some - I don't know Access (I'm more familiar with MySQL) but I can help with the rest.

 

[DataVisually]

This is pretty much what you're going to need - some sort of server you can post to. The server backend can be whatever - Java, PHP, Python, whatever you're comfortable working with. You will need to use mime-type multipart for the form processing.

Basically, set up a server with the backend for the form processing (the receiving end), and POST the image to that URL. Then the server can do the processing necessary to put the image into the database.

If you need help with that backend, I can offer some - I don't know Access (I'm more familiar with MySQL) but I can help with the rest.

Appreciated Tony, we actually have an on-premise server featuring Microsoft SQL Server 2016, this in turn houses our Sage200 database and some of this data is what i'm trying to join together with this app. I have a seperate database which queries the tables in the database but I want to join results of the app mentioned above with the tables live, so I can track certain things in a better way.