Can a smartphone be used to scan a barcode and populate a field in a browser?

[Android Central Question]

Apologies up front if I am in the wrong forum or sub-forum. Not sure where to put this one.

I am working with Habitat for Humanity ReStore. They use Thriftcart for point of sale and inventory management.

We need to be able to go to a product in the store and adjust inventory levels. This sounds perfect for a smartphone and app. Unfortunately, everything they do is via the Firefox browser and PC. They do not offer and app.

I was thinking it may be possible to use the Firefox browser on the smartphone. What I would need to do is use the camera to scan a barcode and it would fill a field on the browser.

Is that possible?

 

[ManiacJoe]

My best guess here is that -- without having a custom app written -- this would be a two step process:
- find an app that will use the phone's camera to scan the barcode and store the data on the clipboard
- switch to the firefox browser, paste the data into the web form.

There seems to be multiple barcode apps available. Some "free" apps seem to be very heavy in the ads.

 

[Mooncatt]

Bar codes are generally product identifiers and hold no data other than a numerical value. I.e. A UPC on a package.

So the first question is which type of bar code are you talking about?

A custom app could work, but would need additional back office handling. Someone would have to input the code into into the inventory system, with a secondary input value linking to the desired URL. When you scan it with the app, it would be programmed to grab that cross referenced URL from the inventory server and open it in a browser. This is how apps for other stores likely run.

An alternative would be to use QR codes, which can have URL data embedded in them. This would eliminate the need for a custom app (any QR reader app would work), but the trade-off would be the need to make custom QR code labels for each different product.

 

[B. Diddy]

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