[AccessD] Scanning into mdb

Gustav Brock Gustav at cactus.dk
Thu Dec 29 13:07:10 CST 2005


Hi Jim

It could have been me and Neal Kling. Haven't heard from Neal for a while so I don't know if he settled on the Kodak Image controls.
I tried those and came a long way but too many blocks on the road. 

Around the web you can find a handful of controls, some very basic, some at fantasy prices. Even free dlls to control a twain source.
As I needed image handling as well and not just scanning, I found a combined control (OCX) which works extremely well at a fair price, csXImage:

  http://www.chestysoft.com/ximage/default.asp 

A free non-expiring demo is for download (it inserts a small watermark in top-left corner of all pictures).
This control will do all operations you'll ever need. The documentation tells it all.
The guy in charge, Simon, is very responsive and his support is well worth the registration fee alone (you may quote me for this).
Registration is only for the developer. Distribution is free of charge.

The trick is to scan the picture, manipulate it as needed and save it - either as a file or as a blob in the mdb - without any temp files or the like. 

I had the same need as you: No discrete files.
What I did was to create a separate mdb with a single table for holding the images with an ID and the other needed registration info; note that the blob will contain the actual picture file, no more no less, thus no bloat. This way pictures can be backed up or copied separately and can be dumped by a simple function to discrete files should you ever need it.

I don't know of these "HIPAA, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996" docs, but if you are scanning simple forms with printed or written info, you can probably do as I did - scan in b/w, use a resolution of 150 dpi, and store in standard TIF format with Group4 compression. This way you get picture sizes of 3 to 4K per page and a quality like an optical photo copier.

The control can read the stored documents and convert them to most other image formats as well as PDF which is extremely convenient if you later wish to retrieve a document and, say, e-mail it. Further - which I use too - you can retrieve the picture and convert it to bitmap and display it directly in a form or standard Access picture control.

This was all done in A97 while a lot of testing was done with A2003 with no issues. Most issues are with the scanners and their buggy twain drivers. Be prepared for wasting a lot of time with testing and/or to buy a new scanner. Not you but others may cross circuit this and scan on a (large and fast) networked scanner which leaves the scanned documents as multi-page TIF files (which csXImage also handles) and then use the control to read your documents from the files into the mdb. 

/gustav

>>> Jdemarco at hudsonhealthplan.org 29-12-2005 16:58:05 >>>
List,

I see in the archives that some of you have implemented scanning of images into your Access systems.  I'm being asked to add some imaging to an existing A97 app that runs in the field on laptops and I've got some questions.

1. Did you scan into BLOB data fields or store in graphic image format?  I'd prefer to use BLOBs as we'll be scanning HIPAA protected personal health information and I don't want files on the laptops that anyone can access.  If you used BLOBs how did you tell the scanner where to store the data?

2. Are BLOBs an issue in A97?  The users fear data corruption.  There will be 1-200 medical charts scanned in per day then the data is replicated back to our main db here.

3. We will be moving to A2K3 within the next few months and probably Win XP (from 2000).  Will twain support in A2K3 and WinXP be an issue?  If so what can I do in our A97 app now that will prevent issues when we upgrade the mdb?  Are BLOBs an issue in A2K3?

This app is for data collection only and if we do store as BLOB we will convert to graphic image for storage and retrieval here so the images would not sit in the mdb for long.

TIA

Jim DeMarco
Director of Application Development
Hudson Health Plan





More information about the AccessD mailing list