A bit o’ this, a bit o’ that, a bit o’ the other, a bit o’ honey
Whew. That was the most complicated demo I’ve ever put together.
To briefly summarize, the application scans in images and uploads them to the image cache, checks them for a barcode, and views them in the browser. Also, you can select an area on the image and return the text through OCR.
None of that is very hard in itself. Scanning – check. Upload – check. Et cetera – check. Peter Cetera – check. Sweep the leg – check.
(Ha – from DotImage to Daniel-san in 5 degrees. New record.)
The hard part was the .Net tweaks and idiosyncrasies. The user control that I embed into the web page also needed to fire a javascript event, which in turn I needed to trigger server-side code. A Com interface handles calling the scanning components, and also launches the event when scanning is completed. DotTwain has the HttpPost class that uploads my images to my page (which I then use a simple Image Decoder to save them to my image cache). Scan the image with the Barcoding engine and I have the filename. Once that completes, an UpdatePanel refreshes my drop down box, and the user can choose to view the document they just scanned.
And for a bit o’ crack, I also threw in the ability to make a selection on the image and return the text.
I went through all this for two reasons. One, there is a potential customer interested in all this. I can show him how easy DotImage and DotTwain are to work with (despite the complicated nature of the app in general, the Atalasoft parts were smooth like butter). Two, someone posted feedback on our website that there weren’t enough demos. We have a little under 4 dozen demos with source code available with the SDK, and a few more here.
Also, for those who want even more interaction with Atalasoft support, you can follow me on Twitter.