Printing Bar Codes with SQR

Sometimes the life of a clerk is made easy by making a barcode available into your reports. For instance you can think of invoices sent to customers or expense report receipts collected from your employees having barcode enabled. This allows you to easily attach a physical document with an electronic document residing inside your system.

You can have this feature in PeopleSoft with the help of SQR programs. Typical implementation of a barcode to one of your reports is an easy task provided you already know the barcode standard that need to be used. The function print-bar-code in SQR prints a barcode of your specified type and data.  SQR supports 15 different types of barcodes. The supported types are

Value	Type	Text Length
1	UPC-A	11, 13, or 16
2	UPC-E	11, 13, or 16
3	EAN/JAN-13	12, 14, or 17
4	EAN/JAN-8	7, 9, or 12
5	3 of 9 (Code 39)	1 to 30
6	Extended 3 of 9	1 to 30
7	Interleaved 2 of 5	2 to 30
8	Code 128	1 to 30
9	Codabar	1 to 30
10	Zip+4 Postnet	5, 9, or 11
11	MSI Plessey	1 to 30
12	Code 93	1 to 30
13	Extended 93	1 to 30
14	UCC-128	19
15	HIBC	1 to 30

The barcode generation syntax is made as simple as possible.  You can take a look at the syntax provided below. For more details on barcode generation and other SQR functions, you may refer the PeopleBooks on that topic.

PRINT-BAR-CODE position

{TYPE={bar_code_type_num_lit|_var|_col}}

{HEIGHT={bar_code_height_num_lit|_var|_col}}

{TEXT={bar_code_txt_lit|_var|_col}}

[CAPTION={bar_code_caption_txt_lit|_var|_col}]

[CHECKSUM={checksum_lit}]

The TYPE will take a value listed in the table above which will create an appropriate barcode. The HEIGHT parameter will set the height of the barcode printed. If you are trying to print a barcode for an expense report in the system, then the unique id or the expense report id should be set to the property TEXT. CAPTION is an optional property, if you want the expense report id to be printed along with the barcode, then you may use this property. I advice to use this always to be in a safer position, if by mistake your barcode reader fails or if the image is faded, then you can easily identify the transaction in database with the caption text. CHECKSUM property takes a Yes or No value to compute and print the checksum.

I have mentioned about the usage in an expense report, let us see how the code will look like for this use case.

begin-program

   print 'Nicoles Expense Report’ (1,1)

   print-bar-code (3,1)

      type=1                                              ! Type = UPC-A

      height=0.3                                      ! Sets the height

      text=’ER345’                                  ! Unique id to distinguish the expense report

      caption=’ER345 Nicole USA’       ! Meaningful information to identify the database transaction manually

end-program