Rf & Edi

[sicranmer]

Stupidly I through a few complicated programs together to help a company out a while ago and now they have got carried away. Good news is I have lots of work, bad news its going to be nasty. Has anyone integrated (or found any articles on) PHP with bar codes, bar code scanners and EDI?

System is Linux (server may upgraded soon to Win XP), apache, php, mysql + access via IE5.5 & 6.

I am expecting I will have to use a system writing out flat files to a dir and have a cron job polling the dir. Same sort of thing with EDI except FTP it to the required site (not sure yet how to receive EDI back ie with security).

If so can you pint me in the right direction.

TA

Si.

[AstroTeg]

EDI is electonic data interchange and is a format for transferring data between machines over a WAN usually. Probably the best thing to do is research how your company implements and uses EDI, then you'll know how to persuade that Linux box to make use of the data.

As for barcoding, what do you wish to have that Linux box do? Create barcodes? Store barcodes? Read barcodes? PHP (and the help of a database) can do all of this.

Barcoding is usually pretty easy. The wand/gun tends to get treated like an additional keyboard so whenever something gets scanned, it pushes the scanned characters onto the keyboard stack and this allows you to build web pages and/or GUI apps without having to know the particulars of barcoding. Although your mileage may vary depending on what scanning gear you are using.

[sicranmer]

Yep,

I know all of that. I was interested if anyone had already implemented anything like this utilising PHP & MySQL.

I integrated bar codes last time with a system which wrote records directly into a specified oracle table. I had a trigger on the table to then process the record depending on its type. However this method is not possible with MySQL AND I don’t have the backing of a large company to ensure I get help from the RF supplier.

EDI - I was after information on secure data transmission from/to a set location utilising MySQL & PHP. Also along the same lines daily data bursts to and from customers ie EDI style messages.

Simon.

[AstroTeg]

PHP and MySQL do not directly have much control over the access methods involved. This is usually a network design issue. For web sites, SSL is the secure method of choice. It could work for you, but it really depends on how your network infrastructure is designed to determine if its a good fit for you.

As for interfacing directly with EDI, I'd presume you'd need to get the specs on how your EDI interacts with other systems (direct connect? XML?) Then build from there.

You're right, MySQL doesn't have the nifty trigger events or stored procedures that were available to Oracle. You might take a look at Postgres because from what I've read, it has a lot more features and functionality then MySQL. Otherwise, if you wish to stay with MySQL, you'd be responsible for creating code (be it PHP or something else) to handle what your trigger event would have done.