Interfacing with the end-user's scanner from a webapp (web/scanner integration)

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Consider the following scanning procedure in a typical document handling webapp:

  • The user scans a document using a scanner connected to his/her computer
  • The scanned image is saved locally on the user's computer as a BMP/JPG/TIF/PNG file
  • The user hits a file upload "Browse.." button in the web application
  • The user is presented with a file dialog which he/she uses to locate the scanned image
  • The user hits "Upload image" and the scanned image is uploaded to the server where it is stored

This process is quite complicated and I'd like to reduce the number of steps in order to make the process more user friendly/fool proof. Under ideal circumstances the above steps would be replaced with only one step in which the procedure initiate document scanning, complete document scanning and upload resulting image is automatically triggered from the webapp when clicking say "Scan and upload". Unfortunely it seems like the state of "web/scanner integration" is quite poor so this might be utopia.

How would you tackle this problem? More specifically, how would you go about reducing the number steps involve in the use-case described?

image-scanner twain language-agnostic
11 Answers

We implemented a solution to implement Remote Deposit for a bank. It works only in IE. A winforms dll was created that interfaces with LeadTools TWAIN dll. Leadtools TWAIN dll abstracts all the TWAIN minutae. This approach is slighly better than using an ActiveX control. .NET Framework would be needed on client. The scanned images are posted back to a hidden variable on the page and are processed on the server.

user_548890
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