How to use the ZXing Open Source barcode scanner in combination with a mobile web app.

Posted in: Android, Blog, Open Source by openhanced on March 24, 2010

One of the great things of Android is the Intents functionality (An Intent is a simple message object that represents an ”intention” to do something) and some smart applications have implemented an even easier method to startup their application, an http URL.

After doing some experiments with the ZXing package we discovered that there is a way to launch the ZXing barcode application by using the URL http://zxing.appspot.com/scan For this to work ZXing needs to be installed of course.

We used this approach to show a small barcode demo to a few people. The demo is about scanning a barcode and starting our own customized mobile web application. When that is done we have the option to scan another barcode, that is using the ZXing URL to start the application.

To get this working you need to do a few settings in the default ZXing application.

1. Goto settings…

and select Custom search URL.

There we will fill out the URL of our mobile web application.

Of course you can replace this by your own custom URL. If you use this URL it will not work for you because we have only one barcode in our database right now.

Now we scan a product and then click Custom search.

Our product in the database is a box of stamps. Our database contains media that is related to stamps (Youtube video, Photo etc.).

Here we have the option “Scan new object”, this feature supports the ZXing option to start the application by an URL.

With ZXing you can build your own barcode database if you want!