We have a customization session to entre daily packed production data.
Now we want to capture the data from weighing scale instead of manual entry. Pl. guide me what is the method/procedure to capture the date from weighing scale instead of manual entry.

with regards

Sanjay Koparde

I have this issue now any one have a solution

This usually requires customizations. There are (to my knowledge) no 'ready-made' solutions. So, first, consider the pro's and con's of doing the automation.

As a concept, here is what is possible:
- I assume that the weighing machine is capable of 'logging' information to a flat file in a computer that it is connected to. (If the machine is not capable of logging data to a flat file or some sort of a database, you have a different level of issues to take care of).
- The format of the log file has all the fields that you are currently entering manually in your customized session.
- I assume that the said computer is on your intranet, so that the log file that is created can be copied over to the BAAN server. (Otherwise, the copy would have to be done by a human manually).

- Based on the script of your customized session, create a new session that will read the data from the log file of the weighing machine and update your system, as if the data was entered manually in your current existing session.

- Once the new session is ready and tested, it can be set up to run as a job according to any suitable frequency.

This is the concept. There are so many other issues to consider - how to pull the log file from the machine's computer to the BAAN server on a periodic basis, how to make sure the same file is not processed twice, how to make sure a file is not missed out, how to make sure the system starts where it left off after a power-failure, print out an exception report so that any records that were not processed can still be entered later on manually, and such. All in all, you are considering a 'batch' type system, so all the fail-safe required of such systems have to be put in place.

Hope this helps . . .

Hi,

We have done this at our end. Shah_bs has already stated some important points. I would like to add a few too. Well, in our case we had a bit different situation. We had a software at weighbridge which had MS Access as its DB.

One of the developer created a small .NET application. We added a data-source which connected the local machine to Server DB.

We create a table in our LN Database after identifying the things to be updated.
We kept an additional field Date -Time of entry too.

The .Net application was added in the Windows startup program. After getting started, it will keep running as a background process and keep updating LN table every 3 minutes.

There can be different ways to do this, you just need to figure it out, which will work the best for you.

There can be different ways to do this, you just need to figure it out, which will work the best for you.

If the weighing software has a database on a different server and you don't want to worry about FTP/copy access between the systems, you can develop an internal webpage that simply outputs the data you need for LN/Baan by taking the requested weigh ticket number/load/order/etc. from the URL string, query the information on the server, output the result as text in the browser. No special format or graphics, just the line(s) of data.

Build the URL string in the LN/Baan session and use CURL to execute the URL, saving the results to a file on the LN/Baan server. Once the CURL command is complete, open the file, read data, perform the activities in LN/Baan.

This method works for batch/job processing and interactive/session without worrying about user permissions on the weighing server/database and eliminates the requirement for FTP between servers.

Good one Dave.

Good use of Curl.