Hello every one,
Hope you’re doing fine. I have a query can we print barcode for items in order to place on inventory.
The requirement is to print the barcodes and place then on items （each） for pricing of GRN via scanner.
I tried but couldn’t find the option.
Best regards,
Sadat
Thanks for the question, Sadat.
We have an experimental feature for printing shipping labels using ZPL, but haven’t ported that over to products yet. I don’t think it would be too difficult, but need to investigate.
Can you attach an example of a barcode label? What data do you want on the label? I would assume this would be at the inventory item level (so product code, lot number, and maybe bin location). Or perhaps you want separate barcodes for bin location and product code.
Justin
Here’s a ticket that was created with the basic idea for supporting barcodes. Please feel free to add to it if you have more requirements.
And actually I think I was wrong. We might have added barcode support for inventory items in the following ticket. If that’s true, I’ll write some documentation to explain how to make this work.
You can enable barcode scanning on the web app through a configuration setting. This allows you to perform lookup scans.
To enable basic barcode lookups, add the following line to openboxes-config.groovy.
openboxes.scannerDetection.enabled=true
NOTE: The openboxes-config.groovy file is not the same as openboxes-config.properties. It is a file that should be located in the same directory, but allows you to specify boolean values (true/false) which the .properties file does not handle well.
Here’s a ticket for a React Native prototype that will allow you to scan those barcodes to look up inventory items as well as perform other actions like picking and putaways.
And here are a few more tickets related to barcoding.
Here’s a tutorial for generating barcode labels for inventory items. There are many ways we can make this feature better, including but not limited to changing the output size, printing directly to a thermal printer, etc. So let me know what you think you’d like to see and we can go from there.
Thanks Justin, this is pretty useful and a good starting point.
@sadatali Here’s a video demonstrating the barcode printing capability. I just had to tweak the printing code to get it working again.
Great, thank you.
What’s the emulator app so that I can also download it since it can adjust the size of the label as well.
Sadat
another thing, I hope sooner it will be available for download or upgrade to Openboxes?
Yes, I’ll push my changes to the develop branch soon and let you know where you can access it.
Here’s the ZPL emulator.
And here’s another plugin that might be useful.
As for changing the size of labels, I am planning to support the ability to add custom attributes to documents so that we can set values for properties like height and width directly on the Zebra template (document) after it has been uploaded. These custom attributes will then be passed to the render / print method or we can prompt the user for these values at runtime if they haven’t been set.
Unfortunately, that’s a bigger piece of work than I have time for right now so it might not get done in the foreseeable future. Therefore I’ll try to create config properties for a few of these attributes and just prompt the user for the values (in addition to # of labels to print) for every print request.
Let me know if there’s anything else that’s missing.
Also, here’s a response to your previous email (sent to support@openboxes.com)
actually In my local marked I want to capture the Retail Industry. If we have Openboxes as the Warehouse management system, since it can mark bin/location for the inventory item. in order to print the barcode labels for placing on the inventory item it should be able to do it.
So it sounds like we can do this part with what exists.
Once labels are printed and placed on items we can then take Stock Intake.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by Stock Intake? Are you talking about receipt and putaway? Or just an initial stock count? And in either case, can you describe the steps you would take for this process?
My market would love to have POS interated for the retails as a One stop Shop for - Warehouse managment, picklist, label printing and Retail POS for the outlets.
Just to ensure that we’re heading down the right path … what exactly is your market? And where are you located?
2ndly if we place RFID in place we can generate picklist or the items being sold and pick can get a location map from system (based on binlocation marking")
That would be amazing. I don’t have experience with RFID just yet so I don’t know how complicated this would be. But I’ll assume you know. We could also look into integration with a pick-to-light system which wouldn’t require expensive RFID tags and seems like a more accessible way of making order picking more efficient. But we can explore a bunch of technological options for making picks more efficient.
for the pos definitely sales is also included , sorry if i missed it earlier but all
So the Sales POS should probably be done using another system.
In general, we should discuss your requirements in more detail. If you have time let’s schedule a call to discuss details next week.
FWIW, some of the basic barcode scanning can be done at the moment through the current UI (basic lookup and scanners work like a keyboard so they can be used in fields that require input that would be available ). I’ll try to create a video once I get my scanner working with the barcode labels I’m generating.
With that said, the current functionality does not get us very far so there’s a significant amount of work to be done, either in building a new app to be used on handheld devices (computers like the Zebra TC20 or Android/iOS mobile phone) that is customized to do very specific warehouse tasks like stock lookups, item putaway, order picking, etc. Or to implement that functionality into the current web app.
It seems perfect to me like a One stop shop solution great,
Thanks a lot Justin for detailed response.
I will send response to all the points by tomorrow IA. And on Monday, December 07 I have marked your calendar , and will have call. I hope you will be available ? Is Skype or zoom okay for you? I would like to share a WMS solution with you.
Best Regards,
Sadat
Yeah the time you scheduled works for me. The calendar event should has a link to a video call / screenshare app that we’ll use.
Looking forward to talking on Monday.
Hi Justin,
I have tried to respond, appended in red, further we can discuss in detail on monday.
Best Regards,
Sadat
another thing, I hope sooner it will be available for download or upgrade to Openboxes?
I just wanted to respond to this comment and try to close the loop on this issue. The changes I made a few days ago were merged to the develop branch today. That means they’ll be in the upcoming release (0.8.14) which should be in beta testing next week.
Printing via USB assumes you have a printer connected to the server on which is running OpenBoxes. The name of that printer should be added as a configuration property to openboxes-config.properties. Make sure the printer name is all lowercase.
openboxes.barcode.printer.name = printer-name
You can find accessible printers using the Configuration > Settings tab. If I was to use the printer circled below, I would enter the name as “hl-2140-series”.
If you just want to use the ZPL emulator, make sure that it’s listening on IP 127.0.0.1 Port 9100. Or you can change the configuration
openboxes.barcode.printer.ipAddress = 127.0.0.1
openboxes.barcode.printer.port = 9100
The second approach is probably how I’d recommend printing to your ZPL printer. The Rollo printer I have doesn’t support ZPL as far as I can tell so I haven’t been able to test this yet. I’m going to test this out more thoroughly once I get a Zebra printer later this month.
I wanted to share a demo video that I recorded a few days showing how to print ZPL directly to a Zebra ZD420 printer from OpenBoxes.
