Overview of ecpSE


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Use

The OMR scanners that I have used (NCS OpScan Scanners) are both powerful and limited. They are powerful in that they are fast, reliable, accurate, and return a very usable string of ASCII text data. They are limited in that many people are unable to deal with the data, and there are few if any tools on the market to do that. NCS's own ScanTools for Windows offers some editing support through edit profiles, but these are limited.

The purpose of ecpSE is to interpret the data from a scanner, check it for errors, convert it into a usable form, and place it into database. This program is in early alpha stages, but should prove useful to anyone using an NCS (or maybe other?) scanner and Microsoft Access database. With a small amount of editing it should be useful for other databases as well. (Both the Data Access Object model (3.6 and 3.51) and ActiveX Data Objects (2.5) are currently supported.)

For users with SFWLink 1.2 or better, ecpSE [through ecp_lnk.dll] will act as a wrapper to the sfwlnk32.dll, and scan data directly into a database. For users without SFWLink, ecpSE will still import ScanTools' *.DAT text files.

To use ecpSE the user starts ecpSE (by clicking its icon or by typing ecpse.py at a MS-DOS prompt). This is a wizard type program through which the user selects database fields and other information. Based upon this information ecpSE generates an application program (ecpSEa.py) which is customized to enter particular data sets into particular databases. The application program (ecpSEa.py) is run (independent of ecpSE) to control the scanner and the data. It also accepts parameters by which it parses the data and checks it for errors.

Gnu General Public License

ecpSE is distributed under the Gnu General Public License. Please read it and agree with it before you download or use ecpSE.

Future

There are several changes still to be made.

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