Barcode problem

[DennisJones]

I have built a retail app for a members' club based on the Northwind system where I use the invoice generator as a retail screen. The problem is that I am using a barcode scanner to scan in membership cards (works OK) and then on a sub form I scan in what they buy. Some of the products are club only items like lessons and equipment hire and I have assigned a "product number" to them. These items have product numbers typically less than 100 and everything works fine. The problem appears when I try to retrieve a real life bar code which can be 10 or more digits long. I can read it with the bar code reader OK and store it in my data tables but when I try to retrieve it (actually on a combo box) the system says that the code is not on the list even though if I scroll down the combo box or type it in manually it can find it. It's as if there is some sort of size limit being hit (the barcode is stored as a long integer).
Incidentally I have tried defining the field as a text string and that doesn't help.
Thanks Dennis

 

[pbaldy]

I've got a parts inventory system running that uses bar codes. I used text, because many of the bar codes contain letters. That doesn't appear to be the problem here, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

If you can type in the numbers and hit enter (not pick from the list) and it works, I'd make sure about what the scanner is returning, just in case there's a space or something. Go into Wordpad and scan the item and see what shows up there. The number you've got there is within the limits of a Long Integer, so I don't think it's that.

 

[DennisJones]

Just realised that the combo box behaviour is now quite what I thought. If you pick from the barcode drop down list it works but not if you type in the value - what does this imply?

 

[pbaldy]

First thing I would check is the bound column of the combo. What are its row source, column count and bound column properties?