The system allows for the gathering of data pertaining to different products in self-service shops and points of sale located throughout Colombia. Eficacia S.A., a Colombian company, offers this information through the Internet to the distributors of such products.
The application, which was made with the GeneXus Olimar version Pocket PC generator, has five modules: Sold Out Products, Price Checking, News, Market Share, and Barcode Identification; each of these modules is a different executable. "We realized that in this way, there is a notable improvement in performance," commented Mauricio Gallego, analyst and developer at BSC Ltda.
The information gathered by the PDA's at the self-service shops (price, quantity, news, etc.) is downloaded into a PDA administrating system -also developed with GeneXus- located in a PC, which processes the information and integrates it into Eficacia's Aurora system.
The same administrating application cleans and processes the information present in the Aurora system (products, companies, self-service shops, etc.), and automatically loads it into the PDA's.
Gallego said that in the past, this whole process was carried out manually, and led to losing data and delays in obtaining the desired information. He also explained that the application uses the terminal's barcode scanner -Symbol PPT 2800- which was possible thanks to the new forms editor (forms) that enables a very good integration of Active X components.
ActiveSync, free-license software from Microsoft, is used for data transmission. This software makes it possible for the PDA administrating application -located in the PC- to load an .MDB database (Access Data Base), and then download it into the PDA by saving this database in the device and changing it to the .CDB format (Pocket Access Data Base). Likewise, once the device has collected all the information, it will transmit the data to the PC.
"BSC would like to congratulate the whole development team and all people who took part in making such an important and well-made product," said Gallego, who was satisfied with the development experience that was carried out using the new Pocket PC generator.
contact BSC: bsc@uniweb.net.co
GeneXus Olimar version
http://www.gxtechnical.com/olimar
Pocket PC Generator
http://www.artech.com.uy/betas/gxdl/iehelp.htm?English/GeneXus_Olimar_Beta_3/EmbeddedVB/Docum/ReleaseNotes/Olimar/GeneradorEVB.htm