I was approached today by a coworker about integrating the open source Java-based barcode library, Barbecue, into ColdFusion. He wanted to use this library to prototype a project concept for adding barcode support to certain parts of our application. A little bit of play and here’s how it works.

The first thing you will need to do is extract the JAR file from the download ZIP file (the file I used was barbecue-1.5-beta1.jar). Put this file into your {ColdFusionRoot}\runtime\lib (for single server installs). You will need to restart the ColdFusion service for CF to pick that up.

Now lets do some code. First lets create a component called barcode.cfc. And in there we will have a function called getCode128(), which will return a Code 128 barcode that dynamically switches between character sets to give the smallest possible encoding. It will look like so.

<cfcomponent>
	<cffunction name="getCode128" returntype="any" access="public" output="true">
		<cfargument name="data" type="string" required="true" />

		<cfsetting showdebugoutput="false">

		<cfscript>
			outStream = createObject("java", "java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream").init();

			//-----------------------------------------------------------
			// Create the barcode, and draw it to a buffered image class.
			//-----------------------------------------------------------
			barcode = createObject("java", "net.sourceforge.barbecue.BarcodeFactory").createCode128("#arguments.data#");
			bufferedImage = createObject("java", "net.sourceforge.barbecue.BarcodeImageHandler").writeJPEG(barcode, outStream);
		</cfscript>

		<!--- Return the information as streaming bytes of type image/jpeg --->
		<cfset getPageContext().getOut().clearBuffer()><cfcontent type="image/jpeg" variable="#outStream.toByteArray()#"><cfreturn>
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

The code is pretty well documented so it should be pretty clear what we are doing here. Now, to use it we will simply create an instance of our new component, and call the getCode128() function as the source to an image tag in HTML. Like so.

<cfoutput>

<cfset o = createObject("component", "barcode")>
<img src="#o.getCode128('My First Barcode')#" />

</cfoutput>

So there you have it. Give it a go! It was fun!