Printing Barcodes with SAP R/3 and Bar Tender
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Bar Tender Enterprise Edition can be used to print
barcode labels and documents on SAP R/3 systems without the complex programming effort
required by many other solutions. This document provides an introduction; the best way to
fully understand and test the system is to download a copy of the Bar Tender trial
edition. Click here for pricing information and the trial edition.
SAP™ R/3 (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) is an
enterprise-scale, customizable, workflow application produced by SAP AG of Frankfurt,
Germany. It is designed to automate all of the core processes in a large business
including order processing, supply chain, inventory management, order fulfillment, and
customer service, and it is used by medium and large businesses worldwide.
Crucial to SAP's success is its powerful integration features that enable disparate
third-party applications and incompatible databases to exchange information with each
other. Bar Tender uses one of these integration technologies, called Intermediate
Documents (IDocs), to print data from any of your company's SAP-connected databases onto
your labels.
An IDoc (Intermediate Document) is a transactional message, in the form of a text file,
sent from a SAP-connected application to other applications. Most of an IDoc message
consists of fields of data grouped into segments. The segments themselves have a
hierarchical relation to each other.
Example: A physician's prescription of a drug for a hospital patient needs to get to the
hospital's pharmacy. This could be done by means of an IDoc sent from a bedside
application to an application in the pharmacy. Suppose the IDoc has a hierarchy of four
levels of segments:
Patient Name: Johnson
Diagnosis: croup
Diagnosis: tibia fracture
Visit Type: admission
Drug: codeine
Drug: amidol
Visit Type: followup
Drug: naprosin
^ ^ ^ ^
1 2 3 4
Level 1: Contains data that remains constant for years at a time, such as patient name and
address.
Level 2: Contains data that remains constant through a given illness, but changes from
illness-to-illness; such as primary physician and diagnosis. There can be more than one
second level segment for a given patient.
Level 3: Contains data that tend to change from visit-to-visit but remains constant
through a particular visit to the hospital; such as visit type (admission or followup) and
attending physician. A patient may have more than one hospital visit during an illness.
Level 4: Contains data that tends to change from prescription-to-prescription; such as
prescribing physician, medicine, and dosage. More than one medicine may be ordered for a
given patient on a given visit.
Since an IDoc is a message, both the sending and receiving applications must conform to a
common convention about where, in a given IDoc, each piece of data will be found. To this
end, SAP AG has defined several hundred IDoc types and a large number of segment types.
A sending application must construct an IDoc of a given type in accordance with these
definitions and a receiving application, like Bar Tender, must conform to the definitions
when parsing the IDoc. This means that identifying a parser file is one step in setting up
Bar Tender to use data from IDocs. A parser file for an IDoc type contains the information
Bar Tender needs to parse the IDocs; such as what segments can appear in it, which
segments are repeatable, what data fields will appear in each segment, what order the
fields will be in, and what length each field will have. You associate a parser file with
a particular IDoc type on Bar Tender’s IDoc Type Definitions window.
IDoc types have names of six letters and two numerals. SHPMNT01 is an IDoc that embodies a
message about shipments. SAP revises the definitions of IDocs from time to time, and the
two numerals at the end of the name identify the revision.
Segment names may end in three digit version numbers. For example, E2KNA1M001 is a segment
for the DEBMAS02 (customer masters) IDoc type. SAP owners can create their own custom IDoc
types and segment types. Names of segments defined by SAP AG always begin with
"E", while custom designed segment names always begin with "Z".
Since data in a child segment is always associated with the data in its parent, any
non-branching path through a tree in an IDoc, from a top node to a bottom node can be
thought of as a record just like the records in a table-oriented database. For example,
consider the data hierarchy shown earlier, in which each segment has just one field for
simplicity:
Patient Name: Johnson
Diagnosis: croup
Diagnosis: tibia fracture
Visit Type: admission
Drug: codeine
Drug: amidol
Visit Type: followup
Drug: naprosin
Patient Johnson has been treated at different times for croup and a tibia fracture
(details of the first illness are not depicted). In the first hospital visit for the
fracture the doctor prescribed codeine and amidol. In the second, the doctor ordered
naprosin. The path through the tibia fracture and the prescription for naprosin can be
collapsed into a flat record like this:
Patient Name Diagnosis Visit
Drug
Johnson tibia
fracture followup naprosin
The two other complete paths could be collapsed into these records:
Patient Name Diagnosis Visit
Drug
Johnson tibia fracture
admission codeine
Johnson tibia fracture
admission amidol
When Bar Tender reads IDocs, it will collapse data trees into flat records. You will
select the fields from these records that you need on your labels. The Add Database Wizard
takes you through the process of adding a SAP IDoc database to the pool of databases
available to this application.
1. On the Add Database Wizard - Type window, select the radio button SAP
R/3 Intermediate Document (IDoc) File, and then click Next.
2. On the Add Database Wizard - Options window, select an IDoc type and
an IDoc file from which to draw data for your labels. If necessary, add, modify, or remove
IDoc types. When you are finished, click Next.
3. On the Add Database Wizard - Master Segment window, select the Master
Segment and click Next.
4. On the Add Database Wizard - Fields window, select the fields on the
IDoc from which you want to draw data. If you pick any fields on repeating segments, set
the repeating segment rules for each such field.
5. Click Finish.
The Add Database Wizard process is complete and you will be returned to the Database Setup
window. In the tree view of databases available to Bar Tender, there is now a child,
called SAP Database, under All Databases. Fields from the IDoc are available for inclusion
on a label design.
Printing of labels can be automated by including the name of an Idoc on the command line
which runs Bar Tender; command line options are also available for changing the IDoc type
and for automatically erasing the IDoc on completion of printing. Bar Tender’s
Active-X interface also permits programmatic control of the IDoc type and name.
SAP is a trademark of SAP Aktiengesellschaft
Related links:
[
Bar Tender for Windows ]
[
SAP barcode solutions ]
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