Fun with the Barcode Reader in a Power App

A colleague at work asked me the other day if I ever worked with barcode scanning with the Microsoft Power Platform. Surprisingly, I never had. I always welcome solving a mystery, so an early morning ago, I built a Power App that I can run on my iPhone to scan the barcode of any item. Scanning a barcode turned out to be easy with the built-in Barcode Reader control included in Power Apps Studio.

What next? Now, I had Barcode Numbers piling up in a Collection, but so what. It's too soon to declare victory. I changed storing the scanned barcodes from storage in a Collection to storage in a Dataverse Table.

• By creating a Power Automate Flow named Barcode DB (actions shown below), my OnSelect formula changed to this.

BarcodeDB.Run(First(BarcodeReader1.Barcodes).Value, Now());        

• Leveraging a Barcode Library API I was able to use a Get Query API function to return product details that I store in the Dataverse Table. I use the HTTP connector to return the JSON of the product details and the Data Operation Parse JSON action as shown below.

• Storing the barcode scan details with the product details in the Dataverse table looks like this.

• MDA Details Form shown below.

• Scanning with the Power App on an iPhone

• Result found in the Canvas Power App

• Result returned from the Barcode Library API

That's it. From a colleaugue's initial question, to this Canvas App and MDA, working with the Barcode Reader control in a Power App is quite nice.