A barcode is the small image of lines and spaces that is

affixed to retail store items, identification cards and postal mail to identify

a particular product number, person or location. In modern days, researches

even use barcodes to identify bees by pasting small barcode on the body of

bees. Barcodes are used in many areas. What if a business needs arise to get

barcode support in your business?

If your data is stored in SQL Server, then converting them

to barcode is bit of difficulty unless you have tailor made software to support

SQL Server.

Neodynamic has come up with software to support above cause.

Barcode professional for Reporting Service is the first and best Barcode custom

report item (CRI) as they claimed. It may be the first but is it the best? You

will get to know this after reading this review.

Version and Configuration

This review has done using the following software and

hardware configuration:

Windows XP Professional version 2002 service pack 2

SQL Server: Version 2005 Standard RTM

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Designers Version

9.00.1399.00

Neodynamic Barcode Professional for Microsoft SQL Server

Report Services 2.0.2000.0

Processor: AMD Athlon ™ 1 GHz

Memory: 256 MB

System Requirements

Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 or grater

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server Business

Intelligence Development Studio

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Note: Although this review has done using Reporting Services

2005, Barcode Professional also supports Reporting Services 2000. If you use

SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services you can add barcodes into your reports

through Barcode Professional and the requirements in this scenario would be the

following:

Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

Product Overview

Following are the most common barcode standards. Last column

indicates whether the Neodynamic

barcode professional supports the barcode standard.

Out of the twenty-one listed barcode formats, 17 of them are

supported by Neodynamic barcode professional.

It is nothing much really for coder to do. Open a report

service project and drag and drop the barcode professional tool from the tool

box to the place where you need to display or print the barcode. Neodynamic.ReportingServices.Barcode.dll

needed to be included to the project if barcode tool is not in the tool box. For

more information refer the documentation available with the installation.

Step-by-step guide can be found at

http:/www.neodynamic.com/ND/faqstipstricks.aspx?tabid=66&prodid=7&sid=31

Report will be displayed as following.  

Barcode tab allows you to configure barcode properties like barcode symbology, value to encode, additional text needs to display.  For each selected barcode symbology has customized settings like bar height, bar weight and bar ratio. For each barcode symbology use of it will be available so that users can select appropriate symbology to suit their use.

You have the option of selecting font and format features too.  From these features you are able to select a barcode color and background color you like.

Another important feature that available with this tool is ability set colors or font depending on the value which you can set.

Reporting Services allows you to export your reports to a variety of different file formats such us Adobe

Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft Excel (XLS), Tagged Image File Format

(TIFF), Web archive MIME HTML (MHTML), and so on. Barcode Professional supports

all export file formats. Below screenshots of the Employee Report in Excel and

Acrobat PDF formats.

Barcode professional is also available for ASP.Net, ASP.Net Mobile and Windows Forms too.

Performance

To measure the performance simple query was written to retrieve data from Adventureworks which is the sample database comes with SQL Server 2005.

select emp.EmployeeId,NationalIDNumber,emp.title,
con.FirstName + ' ' + 
case 
whencon.MiddleName is null then '' 
else  con.MiddleName 
end +  ' ' +
con.Lastname  as Name
from HumanResources.Employee emp ,Person.Contact con 
where emp.contactid = con.contactid

Simple report was created including

Employee Id, NatioanlIDNumber, Title and Name. There are 290 records return

from the above query. It took 1-2 seconds to display simple report while to

display the barcode included report, around nine seconds were taken. As barcode

will not feature in day-to-day report, this delay can be neglected.

Support

Support is very essential for any tool. By sending an email to support@neodynamic.com, you can get any help that you needed. Additionally web site www.neodynamic.com also provides support for you. From the product installation you can fine off-line support in chm format.

Review Summary

I have divided my review of the Barcode professional into the following categories and rated it on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being best):

Product Information

Is it the best solution as they claimed? If so do not hesitate to download the trial version and evaluate it. The Trial Version of Neodynamic Barcode Professional for Reporting Services is fully functional and has no expiry date. The only limitation it has is that a TRIAL legend will appear on the generated barcode image.