12.0
U
SING
S
OCKET
S
CAN
(K
EYBOARD
W
EDGE
)
If your scanning application is very simple, or your development language is not able to call a DLL, you may
find that using the SocketScan keyboard wedge software (ScktScan.exe) will fill your needs. SocketScan
simply runs in the background monitoring scanning devices and, when data is scanned, it is sent to the
application that currently has the keyboard focus. You may define a prefix and suffix that will be added to
the scanned data, if desired.
There are several drawbacks to this approach. Probably the biggest drawback is that you have no control
over where the data is going – you must take it on faith that the user has selected the appropriate control to
receive the scanned data.
Additional features of SocketScan can now be utilized by the creation of a special DLL. By creating a
SocketScan “Preview DLL”, you can process the scanned data before the data is submitted to the keyboard.
This gives you the flexibility, for example, to change the data prefix or suffix on-the-fly, shave or filter
unwanted characters from the scanned data, etc.
The obvious benefit of using SocketScan is that it works with ANY application that is designed to accept
keyboard input (which is most applications). Data can be scanned into Word Mobile or Excel Mobile as easily
as it can be scanned into your application. No changes are required to your existing application code
whatsoever.
SocketScan can be downloaded for your target platform from
http://www.socketmobile.com/support/downloads/data-collection/
April 8, 2010
Page 74
Document#: 6410-00147 K
Revision 2.28