What types of barcodes does MDK's built-in camera scanner support?

[boghyon]

MDK comes with an integrated barcode scanner as explained by jitendrakumar.kansal in his blog post.

While this is great, I couldn't find the information anywhere what types or formats of barcodes the scanner supports.

What library does MDK use for scanning QR and barcodes? How is the scanner actually implemented by MDK? Is it using the NS plug-in nativescript-barcodescanner? Or other APIs provided by the BTP SDKs?

Some more details about the barcode scanning support would be nice.

[bill_froelich · Accepted solution]

The MDK barcode scanning is relying on interfaces provided by the SAP BTP SDKs. The SDK scanning is in turn using the native device scanning libraries so MDK should also support any of those supported formats. For fun I ran a test today and confirmed that the following list of barcode formats all scanned correctly in MDK on both iOS and Android. There may also be additional formats supported beyond this list since I focused on the most common formats.

Numbers

• EAN-8
• EAN-13
• EAN-14
• UPC-E
• UPC-A
• Code 25

ISBN

• ISBN-13
• ISSN

Alphanumeric

• Code 39
• Code 39 mod 43
• Code 93
• Code 128
• GS1-128 (UCC/EAN-128)

Arbitrary Data

• PDF417
• QR
• Aztec
• Data Matrix

[boghyon · Accepted solution]

Thank you Bill!

I also ran a test yesterday with a set of sample formats. I came to the same conclusion: MDK is pretty impressive when it comes to barcode scanning! I was able to scan literally every single format so far - and very fast - even the color-inverted and mirrored QR codes. The ZXing-js library on the other hand failed several times.

Is it possible to figure out which "native device scanning libraries" the BTP SDKs use?

[boghyon · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill,

So far, I could see that the following classes are available for the system built-in barcode scanning feature:

• For Apple devices: "VNDetectBarcodesRequest" class by the Vision framework.
• For Android devices: "BarcodeScanning" class (formerly "BarcodeDetector") by the ML Kit (which is available for iOS too).

Could you confirm whether the SAP BTP SDKs use the above classes respectively?

[bill_froelich · Accepted solution]

For Android, the SDK is using ML Kit for scanning

For iOS, the SDK is using AVFoundation