Barcode Scanner Control for Phones and Tablets

If the downloadable BC mobile app is simply a cordova wrapper (no clue on this one), it should be trivial for Microsoft to incorporate a native barcode plugin or library to facilitate barcode capture. From there, add a "capture barcode" camera button at the top or bottom of the app's webview. Alternately (to save UI real estate), maybe the BC mobile app can hijack the volume button when the app is in the foreground (there's not much value to the volume controls for an ERP app anyways). E.g. volumedown = launch barcode capture. When pressed, the app captures a barcode via camera and sends it to whatever input control you last focused on. Obviously it won't do any good if you didn't select a field to send your barcode input to. The bigger problem is the BC client doesn't lend itself to barcode capture very well. One must manually focus on an input field to use it and it becomes tedious with repeated interaction. I've read about role tailored client workarounds to this dilemma but they didn't adequately solve the problem (e.g. create a custom page object with just one input field). I'll imagine that the web client makes this landscape worse. not better. For these fringe cases I usually roll my own barcode-optimized web apps where I have total control on programmatic field focusing. Those apps then talk back to BC via SOAP/oData/WebAPI/whatever.

This is a request that I have received a few times from different end clients - so actual installed sites have some demand for this feature (i.e. not just a cool toy to show in a demo).

Please have a look how this has been solved in other D365 applications: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminogic/archive/2017/01/13/read-barcode-value-using-barcode-scanner-control-in-dynamics-365 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dynamicscrm-2016/developers-guide/jj602956(v=crm.8)#getbarcodevalue

Have you actually tried to scan a barcode with a phone/tablet and compared the speed to a classic barcode scanner? (or is this just based on the assumption that it would work as well as a regular barcode scanner?) My earlier test shows that the phone/tables is so slow that it is useless for people who have to scan more than once an hour or so. I'll still vote for this though as it is a nice feature for scanning a few times a day, but in my opinion i cannot replace a classic barcode scanner in PoS, production or warehouse environments.

Please do barcode decoding locally at the device, not send the complete picture back into cloud. Not sure if possible, but I would prefer a complete UPOS support intgetrated into the Win10 client at least. We are currently writing this as a local service and a JS control, would love to see this as "built-In" option.

Barcode printing is of greater importance than phone scanning. Right now we can't get consistent barcode printing on forms or labels for our manufacturing and distribution clients. High volume label printing is a real problem. We can manage Code 39 fairly well, but UPC labels are a real challenge.

For those situations where a large amount of scans are required, have you explored building a PowerApp for that specific functionality? Is the request that if a user scans something the system knows what to do with that scan? For example, if a user scans a bar code from any screen, the system will recognize it is an item bar code and suggest item related actions?

Very interesting. "The bigger problem is the BC client doesn't lend itself to barcode capture very well. One must manually focus on an input field to use it and it becomes tedious with repeated interaction. I've read about role tailored client workarounds to this dilemma but they didn't adequately solve the problem (e.g. create a custom page object with just one input field). I'll imagine that the web client makes this landscape worse. not better." Absolutely agree with this opinion.

Are there any news on this topic?

The page on mobile device (put-away, pick, ...) should be completely rebuild in function of a barcode scanning functionality. The focus should be speed of use and obviously reduced mistakes that come with implementing barcode scanning.