How to add Scandit barcode plugin to custom build of Phonegap developer ios app?

Question

I use Phonegap Desktop and Phonegap Developer app for a while now. This is really interesting for quickly testing my development. But I'm facing a limitation with the embedded barcode scanner which is displaying the camera display in full screen. I need to embed the camera display into a container so I have space for displaying information in the same time.

After searching for a while, I've discovered the Scandit SDK for PhoneGap was the only plugin which allows cropping the camera display.

I spent a lot of time trying to implement Scandit, but no success. At least I can build the app, but when using it, scanner is not working...

Here are the steps I've followed:

• clone the PhoneGap Developer project from Git
• Install using npm
• add ios platform
• open the xcode project file
• build the application and run it on device

=> At this time the PG Dev is running well and my application is working fine

Then, i continued:

• remove all reference to the default barcode scanner plugin
• build the application and run it on device

==> PG Dev still working fine and my application is working fine

Next steps:

• clone the Scandit phonegap plugin from Git
• download the Scandit SDK from my scandit account
• put the SDK into the cloned scandit phonegap plugin
• modify the plugin.xml to change the path to the bundle and framework (mismatch of version name in the path)

<resource-file src="src/ios/scanditsdk-community-ios_4.16.1/ScanditBarcodeScanner.bundle"/>
<framework src="src/ios/scanditsdk-community-ios_4.16.1/ScanditBarcodeScanner.framework" custom="true"/>

• copy bundle and framework into the correct folder of scandit
• modify the config.xml to include reference to Scandit and set the spec attribut to the version of the SDK
• build the application and run it on device

==> PG Dev still working fine and my application is working fine (it doesn't use scandit for the moment)

Next steps:

• Remove my project from PhoneGap desktop
• add Scandit Sample project to PG Desktop I used the "Continuous Scaled/Cropped" example from there: http://docs.scandit.com/4.12/phonegap/cordova-examples.html
• add my App Key for the license
• launch my PG Dev app on my device and download the project files

==> PG Dev is running fine and download the Scandit Sample App. But the app doesn't work. When clicking on the scan button, nothing happends..

After some investigation, I found that I ran through an exception on Scandit class. Adding a try on the command 'Scandit.License.setAppKey' allowed me to report in the PG Desktop log the following error:

ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Scandit

Adding this try/catch made the app raising an exception at the next line:

var settings = new Scandit.ScanSettings();

After searching the web about my error, and some posts were suggesting to manually add the framework and bundle into xcode.

So I did it by drag&droping the framework and bundle into the framework folder of the xcode project.

But when I try building my project, it is failing with many errors... To solve it, I had to had manually all the scandit plugin files (*.h and *.m) into my xcode project.

All previous errors have been solved, but new ones appeared. This was due to some other missing native ios frameworks... Once these framework added, all errors were solved and I managed to successfully build the application.

But when running it, I'm still having the error: "ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Scandit"

I'm now running out of idea.. What did I do wrong? Is there anyone having managed to build a PG Desktop with Scandit embedded?

Thanks.

Sorry for this long post, just tried to be the more precise I could be.

Answer 1

Thanks @moritzha. It helped me finding the solution. I followed this doc at the beginning but it was not working. After adding the plugin and building the application, I never managed to see it in my xcode project.

I took the opportunity of changing my mac to restart everything from scratch, and after many tries I found where I was wrong. In fact, the documentation provided by scandit is missing one step.

The command ' phonegap plugin add < path to downloaded and unzipped plugin > ' is doing half of the job.

The command is correctly copying the plugin files to my project but it is not updating the config.xml. So before building your application, you have to edit the config.xml located at the root of your project folder. You need to manually reference the plugin with the following: and replace the x by the version of the sdk you will use.

Once the config.xml updated, you will be able to build the app for your targeted platform.

I now have my own version of the Phonegap Developer App with the Scandit plugin in place of the default barcode scanner plugin. And it works perfectly. This plugin is awesome!

PhoneGap Developer App version: 1.7.2 (taken on Github)

Answer 2

The issue here is two fold. First you need to be aware that the Scandit Barcode Scanner plugin makes use of native code and can therefore not be used in the Phonegap Developer app, as the only thing transmitted to it is your html/css/javascript and the javascript part of the plugin. To also include the native parts of the plugin you have to build and deploy the project yourself. As you are trying to build the XCode project it seems like you are now doing this.

The second part is that you are way overcomplicating the adding of the plugin. There is no need for you to manually clone the git repo, add our libraries, adjust paths in the plugin.xml etc. You can directly download the entire plugin as a zip from your account at scandit.com where the library is contained and the plugin.xml is correct. After that you can simply add the plugin to your project through the CLI (also see our documentation for this at http://docs.scandit.com/stable/phonegap/cordova-integrate.html) and there is no need to do anything manually unless you are using a very outdated Phonegap version that fails to properly handle the plugin.xml. Doing it the automated way with our properly prepared plugin zip will remove most error sources, please try it that way.